I survived my only pregnancy because of modern science. I had pre-eclampsia and a very large baby that never “turned”.
I have an ancestor who had full eclampsia and died.
My local PBS affiliate carries some BBC News broadcasts, and I just saw part of Queen Elizabeth’s Christmas broadcast. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that she was delivered by cesarean section, and thinking that they must have almost lost both of them, for the procedure to be considered that long ago.
She will be 90 next year.
While the maternal mortality rate was definitely higher in the past, and there’s no arguing that, I think it’s possible that the *minor *complication rate may have been lower. We don’t have numbers on that. But consider the rise in obesity and greater number of women living sedentary or near sedentary lives before they have babies, and advanced maternal age at the time of first birth. We know all those factors are correlated with increased complications during pregnancy and childbirth. One could make an educated speculation that women who didn’t actually die in childbirth when things went really really wrong may have suffered from less “birthing damage” because they were in better physical shape than your average American woman of today.
Probably need to go back more than 100 years to see the greatest impact though… the lithotomy position for childbirth is not at all helpful to the mother or fetus, narrowing the pelvic passage by up to 1/3 its squatting diameter, but doctors encourage (or demand) it because it makes things easier for them. Got to go back to the early 1500s to get away from that positioning, unless you were birthing alone or with a midwife with a birthing stool.
It may have seemed that way because many of them were not diagnosed, or even looked for. My aforementioned grandmother once said, “We didn’t do all these tests back then, and things usually turned out OK” and I replied, “Yes, they usually turned out OK, but not always.” She did agree with me.
I occasionally hear about how this or that woman had a series of 9- or 10-pound babies, and I always think that they probably had gestational diabetes, which is usually asymptomatic until it becomes quite serious. Women who have this are at increased risk of getting type 2 diabetes later on.
I doubt this. I assume some especially poor women engaged beyond being a housewife in physical work that kept them in shape somehow. As for 20th Century none of older female relatives, grandma, grandma’s three sisters, grand grandma went to gym. They are/were out of shape
I am the biological mother of 6 children, ages 3 to 24. I think it’s realistic for me to compare myself to my grandparents. My father’s mother lost her first son - he was a 10-pound baby, stillborn after 48+ hours of labor in 1931 in rural Georgia. Given that Grandma was 4’10" and 90 pounds, it’s probably a good assumption that a 10 pound baby was the result of untreated and unrecognized gestational diabetes. Her next pregnancies were difficult, and she suffered from uterine prolapse after her final pregnancy, when my father was born - her fifth pregnancy (stillborn Neil, my 2 aunts, an early miscarriage, and then my father.) My mother was also the baby of her family, and Grandmother’s doctor was treating her for what’s now known as bipolar disorder. He advised her that another baby would be good for her nerves. I’ll just leave that there…
Grandmother was the youngest for both of her parents. Granny was an old maid of a bride: 31 when she married my great-grandfather. His first two wives died in childbirth, the first in 1894 (hemorrhage) and the second in 1909 (infection.) He already had 11 children when he married for the third time, though two had already died as young adults. Granny had 5 children between 1918 and 1925. I don’t know that she suffered any ill effects from pregnancy and childbirth - she lived independently until age 88, and died at 92 with all of her teeth. But she was an older bride because she was tasked (as oldest daughter) with raising her siblings. Her mother was unwell for a number of years, and based on what I heard of her symptoms, she probably was chronically anemic.
Anemia - today, that’s easily diagnosed, and costs $4 per month for iron supplements. In 1900, it meant that your eldest daughter left school to raise her siblings. When I had it, I picked up a prescription and accepted a little extra TLC when I was exhausted because my hemoglobin was below 9. Gestational diabetes isn’t quite as uncomplicated today, but the screening exists and successful pregnancies are common, if not easy. I had a couple of vitamin K injections after otherwise uncomplicated deliveries, because of bleeding issues. Would I have died 75 or 100 years ago? Maybe. I don’t know whether pregnancy complications are more or less common today, but they’re a damn sight less dangerous than they were a few years ago.
My grandmother was a housewife and never “exercised”. But she walked to the butcher, and the greengrocer, and to half a dozen other shops multiple times each week. She chased children. She cleaned her house. She was not in bad shape until she was in her 90s, in a nursing home, with no responsibilities.
Simply being “a housewife” meant a lot more physical work (exercise) before washing machines and no wax floors.
Which may again push us back a bit more than 100 years ago, but i suspect the OP was using that number to mean, “before modernity,” not literally asking about 1915.
I’ll give you a rise in obesity, but you’ll have to give a lowering of malnutrition- including women given birth under near starvation conditions. An my great grandmother had eleven children and a farm to run, she wasn’t sedentary before that last birth - she wasn’t sedentary before the first one - there was still a farm to run, enough food to cook to feed the workers for harvest and planting, a kitchen garden to keep, and enough food to can and meat to cure to get you through a Minnesota winter. My paternal great grandmother was working at the slaughterhouse until she went into labor for each of her three children. Sedentary has its advantages before birth - or at least, the number of my friends that have been put on bed rest seem to indicate it has some benefit.
(My great grandmother with the twelve pregnancies did suffer from PPD and did spend her final years being the crazy relative that never left her room).
apparently, there is no evidence favoring bed rest.
Was just gonna say that. 
Gestational diabetes is undoubtedly responsible for some of the 8 pound preemies of the past (estimated birth weights and lack of accurate/honest reporting of conception dates contribute as well). ButGD rates have been increasing just in the short time that we’ve been paying attention and studying them. It’s likely that in the long ago past, it affected fewer than 1% of pregnancies. To put that into modern perspective, it was probably about the rate of shoulder dystocia today. That’s a really serious, scary thing when it happens, but most people have never heard of it because it’s so rare. (It’s also likely to have happened less in the past with more upright birthing techniques.)
Anemia and vitamin K deficiency bleeding (VKDB) were definitely higher in the past before we had appropriate interventions for them, and responsible for many antenatal deaths. But those aren’t complications for the mother (except in the emotional sense), those impact the health of the baby. Likewise, maternal undernutrition mostly affects the baby, and since it often leads to poor intrauterine growth and small babies, actually makes delivery easier.
is there any evidence that pogo clowns helped mothers with labor?
When my paternal grandmother (who had my dad when she was 17 - happened all the time) was about 70 years old, she was diagnosed with high cholesterol and for a while was taking meds for it and her doctor recommended a special diet. Not long afterwards, she came for a visit, and said, “My mother lived to be 83 and she never worried about cholesterol! She ate sow belly and eggs fried in lard, and pumped her own water…” etc. (I definitely remember the “sow belly and eggs fried in lard” statement.) She didn’t stay on those meds for long, probably because of cost issues, and like my maternal grandmother also lived to be 91.
Grandma’s youngest sister had mild MR; she was born a bit prematurely, and while I don’t know any other details, there’s an excellent chance that nowadays, she would not have been mentally disabled.
I do have some in-laws on that branch of my family tree who have familial hypercholesterolemia, which does warrant treatment.
Iron supplements are OTC and dirt cheap; however, they’re worthless without B-12 supplementation if a person has pernicious anemia. This B-12 cannot be given orally, because the stomach has stopped producing a substance called intrinsic factor, which enables the body to absorb it. You can get injectable or nasal B-12 by prescription, or sublingual B-12 without one; unfortunately, this is another RX item that’s unnecessarily become very expensive in recent years. :mad: :rolleyes: :mad:
The book “Sybil Exposed”, which is about the notorious multiple-personality case, came out a few years ago, and illustrates an extreme example of what can happen when pernicious anemia is undiagnosed. “Sybil”, AKA Shirley Ardell Mason, probably had it, as did her mother, who almost certainly did not abuse her either.
Vitamin K injections are routinely given to babies before they leave the delivery room, because the bacteria that produce the vitamin K we need take several days to colonize the GI tract, and it reduces the possibility of hemorrhage. Interestingly, some families have refused it because they think it’s a vaccine. :smack:
For that matter, there has been an urban legend for a few decades that the heel stick done on newborns to test for PKU and other genetic diseases is actually the implantation of a microchip. A while back, I asked some OB nurses if that was true; they said it wasn’t but I already knew that. 
It wasn’t the first time they’d been asked it either. These same nurses also convinced me that a known breech presentation calls for an automatic c-section; they had seen too many babies who died or were left damaged, and women who suffered terribly, when they didn’t have to. 
But only if it was during the pregnancy. Lifelong malnutrition can lead to stunted growth and a contracted pelvis. This was another thing that the aforementioned Dr. Sacra commonly deals with in Africa, that first-world OBs rarely see.
Consider the effect of rickets alone on women in the past.
Yes, they are still used. My wife used one until she got a hysterectomy. She had difficulty inserting and removing it, so her Ob/Gyn showed me how to do it for her.
WTF???
You need to report that doctor to the medical board in your state. You were 34-35 weeks, and those are pretty damn classic symptoms of pre-eclampsia and they should at the very least have ordered a 24 hour urine test (I assume your on-the-spot test didn’t show enough protein to worry them).
I had pre-eclampsia with my last pregnancy - diagnosed well before those symptoms started. In fact I was in the hospital being monitored, BP was stable, they were thinking of sending me home with home monitoring… when a last set of bloodwork showed that things were starting to go the wrong direction. I had the baby 2 hours later - 34 weeks on the nose.
All that said: yeah, I’d have died from that pregnancy a hundred or so years ago. My son might not have survived his delivery (or would have been pretty impaired as he had the cord tangled everywhere and was going into distress).
Oh dear. Is anyone else noticing the username and post content synchrony here???
This is why they say that pregnant women shouldn’t handle firearms.