Kill the Economy

[NoOneMan]

70. Rawest end of the forceps you mean?

Male doctors thinking that pregnancy was an acute medical condition rather than a natural process and overly intervening is thought to be the source of much of the high maternal death rates in the last few hundred years. More interestingly, even with modern medical advances, it is midwifery that produces more positive birthing outcomes (and lower mortality) among patients according to recent peer-reviewed studies conducted in Washington and British Columbia.

And why, I must ask, do you believe that before there was shiny plastic stuff that women did not get "medical care" during birth? Midwifery is a very ancient practice and women were not just cast out in a field alone to sink or swim (with cultural exceptions that still exist).

I do imagine infection was probably the worst of the issues women had to face (we know enough now to minimize this), but perineal tears would be very difficult to treat (although their ocurance in "natural" births are far less common). We also know that quite a few primitive cultures do have their own natural sources of antibiotics that they use; somehow between the onset of agriculture and now, there was a large gap where people lost a lot of knowledge and there was a lot of suffering in civilized society that could of been avoided.

In any case, the study I cited makes a compelling case that nutrition played a large impact on producing better outcomes among foraging societies, but I would like to hypothesis that it may also be because they had a different view of the process and handled the birthing differently (perhaps more like modern midwifery, which stresses patience and calmness instead of invasiveness).