How exactly did women used to die in childbirth?!


Question:

How exactly did women used to die in childbirth?

I know a bunch of old books and movies refer to women dying in childbirth, but how exactly can that happen? Do they bleed to death, pass out or forget to breathe due to pain, suffocate, or just die because they can't get a C-section? What? Also, does anyone know how common it was? What about how common - uncommon - it is today?


Answers:

Women still die during childbirth, even though it was much more prevalent before the health care boom of the last 50 years or so.

Many women would bleed to death, have strokes or heart attacks during many hours of labour, or get internal infections that would kill them.

My grandmother gave birth to twelve babies without assistance in the early 1900's. eight who survived to adulthood. She also acted as a midwife to hundreds of other mothers and babies, as the nearest hospital was over 200 miles away. This was in rural Canada.

She talked about losing three or four women for every ten births she attended. Many of those deaths were described as infection or consumption in those times, as there were no surgeries or doctors or scans or x rays or any of the things that we take for granted.

A lessor amount of women die today, because of better health care and then there are the working poor who cannot afford health care and struggle on in the same manner as my ancestors. Pretty sad, when the USA is one of the richest countries in the world.




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