Thai, a monosyllabic isolating language, has a 3-syllable phrase for “to die in childbirth” – but it’s three words.
Anyway, the thread has taken a different turn which allows me to mention a pet peeve. Text should be self-contained without reference to title. Good titles are fine, but supplemental. That’s usually not a big issue at SDMB, because the thread title is repeated in the text body. In this case, however, OP made his question cryptic just to fit it into a restricted-length title.
(One of many annoyances long ago with Yahoo Mail is, after I finally figured out how to save a message, the title wasn’t saved with the message. Often the message’s meaning was then indiscernable if correspondent ignored above rule.)
The Latin/Spanish/other-romance-languages word nonato “unborn” means, among other things, a child whose mother died during birth or so shortly before that the child could be cesareaed out. I can’t come up with a single word for the mother, whether she’s died during the birth, before or of birth-fever.
Spanish also uses caídos (fallen) almost exclusively for people dead in battle. The almost is because it can also be used poetically, but then it’s understood to be a figure of speech: the literal meaning refers to dead from battle/war.
Huh. I read the op as asking for a word which means that for every person killed in battle, two die in childbirth - if that’s a real statistic, which it probably isn’t.
OP here, bloodied but unbowed. We’ve all had our fun now. I can’t rewrite the OP, right? It was clear what I thought would be a good GQ–and still is–quite early in the thread. So sue me, I was trying to save bits and voltage, because I listen to Al Gore. Trust me, were I to have gotten wordy, it might’ve gotten ugly.
See, that was a pretty complicated sentence, tense-ity-wise.
Frankly, that two people thought that I was asking about a unified concept and correlation–and that even there might be such an expression or thought common enough among cultures–strikes me as funny, creative, interesting in itself as to written communication and it’s short hands, and a little weird also…
The answers were nice. I still would like to hear some Latin or Greek people chime in on this.