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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

>According to the Guardian, historians posit that childbirth was the main cause of death for English women between the late 5th and 11th centuries; the study notes that the neonatal mortality rate during this period was between 30 and 60 percent.

Good lord. I can't imagine all the ways in which that fact weighed on culture, from religiosity (the only way to have a feeling of control) to relations between men and women (sex has a chance of death).

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It was probably not worth investing into education of women either if they had high chances of dying during the inevitable childbirth happening some day in their lives. Émilie du Châtelet died during childbirth.

Shuddering at the thought of perceiving women at nothing but pretty incubators, and I wonder how many societies still function in this way today after seeing a video about Kogi women.

You should be thankful, not shuddering over humans doing what they had to for survival. You wouldn’t be here today without it.

The 30-60% chance of death is the infant mortality rate, not the risk of mothers dying in childbirth.

If women had even a 30% chance of dying in childbirth, it would be very difficult to maintain replacement levels of birthrates (as each woman, on average, needs to have 2 children).

Well it was very common to have 5+ kids even 100 years ago. Some sources say 5-6 was an average number of pregnancies.

I think you might be reading this incorrectly. It might be not that every pregnancy had a 30% chance to kill a woman, but that the cause of death of 30% of women was child birth complications. E.g. 70% of women probably had many pregnancies and lived after, and in the other 30% some might have actually went through 2+ pregnancies before dying during one.

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