Medieval Childbirth

 Childbirth is always a perilous time.  Even with modern medicine, it is among the leading causes of death for younger women (especially those in communities without good access to health care).  It was, not surprisingly, even more perilous in medieval times.

Girls hit puberty then rather later than they do now, around fourteen or fifteen rather than at the age of eleven, which has become the most common age in the US.  Partly they didn't have all the hormones now found in the water, and partly girls were skinnier then (onset of puberty is governed in part by body mass).  So they didn't have the cases one hears about now, of ten year olds discovering they're pregnant, but by a time a girl was in her mid-teens she was considered of marriageable age, with the assumption that she would soon start having children.

Childbirth is more risky for humans than for most mammals because of our upright stance.  To keep all our internal organs from slopping down around our knees, our pelvic bones provide a solid floor to the torso, with only a narrow opening in the middle, through which a baby has to squeeze.  A cat or dog can flop down on the floor and pop out half a dozen kittens or puppies through a wide gap in the pelvis, but not humans.  The baby has to go through head first, so if a baby is upright in the womb (breech position), having a leg go through first is just not going to work.  If the baby gets stuck halfway through, both baby and mother are going to die.  King Louis VII of France lost a wife that way.

Through the first half of the twentieth century, obstetricians would practice reaching in and twirling a breech baby before it entered the birth canal, but this of course required a special touch.  If medieval midwives did something similar we don't know about it.  These days the usual answer for a breech baby or for prolonged contractions that aren't pushing the baby out is a Caesarian section, cutting open the mother's abdomen and womb to bring out the baby.  This is fine for the baby, but the mother has to recover from fairly major surgery.  It was impossible in the Middle Ages, because without antibiotics and microclamps to stop the bleeding the mother would die, so it was only undertaken if the mother was going to die anyway.  (Caesar, after whom the procedure is named, was cut out of a dying mother.)

Medieval women of course gave birth without pain killers, but at least they did not give birth lying on their backs with their feet in the air, which works fine for the attending doctor but works against gravity.  They were attended by midwives, who had a wide mix of fanciful and accurate ideas about how the procedure worked.  They would help with things like breathing exercises and would keep the procedure fairly clean, while also muttering charms, putting knives on the floor to "cut the pain," and the like.  Here they were ahead of nineteenth-century doctors, who might go straight from treating a patient with an infectious disease to treating a woman in labor, without bothering to wash up, and who would often chloroform the mother.  She'd miss the worst pain that way, but by being out of it she wouldn't be able to consciously push.

Women all lactate after giving birth, although not all give enough milk, and some babies have trouble figuring out how to latch on.  Most women nursed their own babies, but one could also hire a "wet nurse," someone who'd recently had a baby herself.  She might nurse her own baby on one breast and the baby she was paid to nurse on the other, though it was considered best by those hiring wet nurses if her baby had died, because then there was no competition.  Fashionable women might prefer wet nurses as it kept their breasts from getting as large (small breasts were considered attractive).

Contraception, without modern pills and devices, was always tricky.  Medieval people knew perfectly well "where babies come from," but humans lack the "being in heat" condition that defines the fertile period for most mammals.  There were lots of supposed ways to prevent pregnancy, including herbal suppositories, condoms made from animal intestines, and various concoctions to drink.  Some may even have worked, though humans are not nearly as fertile anyway as many creatures, and being underfed or nursing reduces the chance of pregnancy.

If they got pregnant anyway when they didn't want to, there was always abortion, or at least herbal concoctions that were supposed to end the pregnancy.  One saint, still a saint in the Catholic church, miraculously caused an abortion.  A nun, the story went, had been raped, and she was very worried that her abbess would not believe her and would cast her out as a wanton woman.  But when she realized she was pregnant she prayed to the saint, who miraculously restored her to her previous condition, as though she had never been pregnant at all.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on women, children, and hygiene in the Middle Ages, see my book, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available in paperback or as an ebook from Amazon and other on-line booksellers.