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0 pointsepistasis9y ago0 comments

To answer some of my own questions, child birth is becoming tremendously safer:

  Year           Deaths per 1000 live births
  ------------   ----------------------------
  1700 to 1750	 10.5  (British [1])
  1750 to 1800	  7.5  (British [1])
  1800 to 1850	  5.0  (British [1])
          1990    3.8  (Global [2])
          2013    2.0  (Global [2])
          2013   <0.09 (UK [3])
          2013   <0.28 (US [4])

Though I can't find a source, some articles claim a 1% maternal mortality rate in the 1600s! [5]

From that same Slate article, child birth is still one of the most dangerous things for young women, despite it being far safer than ever in the past. This means that contraception is actually a health benefit. It makes it much safer to be a young woman.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/

[2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT

[3] http://patient.info/doctor/maternal-mortality

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/health/maternal-mortality....

[5] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...

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2 comments · 1 top-level

antisthenes9y ago· 1 in thread

Why is it surprising that women are really good at giving birth?

After all, the genes of the ones that weren't have not been selected for, tens of thousands of years ago.

Either way, contraception is pretty orthogonal to the actual mortality rate of women due to child birth.

epistasisOP9y ago

It's actually the opposite: Humans are not very good at giving birth. And that is surprising.

Child birth is hugely dangerous for humans, and the speculation in the scientific field is that it's an evolutionary interplay between the size of an infant's skull at birth, constraints on hip sizes, and the amount of brain development that can happen as a fetus or as an infant.

Tens of thousands of years is pretty short in terms of morphological development of humans. Evolution on time scales shorter than that is limited to extremely simple mutations, usually, such as lactose tolerance by adults (which has arisen multiple times independently in the past 10k years).

I do agree that contraception has little impact on maternal mortality during child birth.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

Year Deaths per 1000 live births ------------ ---------------------------- 1700 to 1750 10.5 (British [1]) 1750 to 1800 7.5 (British [1]) 1800 to 1850 5.0 (British [1]) 1990 3.8 (Global [2]) 2013 2.0 (Global [2]) 2013 <0.09 (UK [3]) 2013 <0.28 (US [4])