The Life Cycle: BirthConsideration

The Life Cycle: Birth

Consideration of the basic conditions of life provides a fundamental perspective on any period of the past. Social historians also use another set of perspectives to examine the history of daily life: an examination of the life cycle from birth to old age (see table 18.4). Few experiences better illustrate the perils of the Old Regime than the process of entering it. Pregnancy and birth were extremely dangerous for mother and child. Malnutrition and poor prenatal care caused a high rate of miscarriages, stillbirths, and deformities. Childbirth was still an experience without anesthesia or antisepsis. The greatest menace to the mother was puerperal fever (child-bed fever), an acute infection of the genital tract resulting from the absence of aseptic methods. This disease swept Europe, particularly the few “laying-in” hos-pitals for women. An epidemic of puerperal fever in 1773 was so severe that folk memories in northern Italy recalled that not a single pregnant woman survived. Common diseases, such as rickets (from vitamin deficiency), made deliveries difficult and caused bone deformities in babies. No adequate treatment was available for hemorrhaging, which could cause death by bleeding or slower death by gangrene. Few ways existed to lower the risks of difficult deliveries. Surgical birth by a cesarean section gave the mother one chance in a thousand of surviving. Attempts to deliver a baby
by using large forceps saved many lives but often produced horrifying injuries to the newborn or hemor rhaging in the mother. A delicate balance thus existed between the deep pride in bearing children and a deep fear of doing so. One of the most noted women of letters in early modern Europe, Madame de Sévigné, advised her daughter of two rules for survival: “Don’t get pregnant and don’t catch smallpox.”

The established churches, backed by the medical profession, preached acceptance of the pain of child birth by teaching that it represented the divine will.

The explanation lay in the Bible. For “the sin of Eve” in succumbing to Satan and being “the devil’s gateway” to Adam, God punished all women with the words: “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” (Gen. 3:16). Even when the means to diminish the pain of childbirth became available, this argument sustained opposition
to it.