My understanding is that women who have had kids are more prone to certain physical ailments later in life, e.g. incontinence, uterine prolapse to name a couple.
What aspect of making babies is primarily responsible for these sorts of issues? Is it the 9 months of gestation, or the delivery itself?
Obviously it’s hard to deliver a baby vaginally without having been pregnant in the first place, but plenty of mothers have done the inverse, i.e. gone through pregnancy and then delivered a baby via C-section, thus avoiding whatever trauma might have been inflicted by normal/vaginal delivery. How do these women tend to fare later in life compared to mothers who delivered vaginally?