Anthropologists tell us that among truly primitive cultures, childbirth is easy and painless, a simple and rapid process. In his visit to Alaska, Weston Price interviewed Dr. Joseph H. Romig, superintendent of the government hospital for Eskimos and Indians at Anchorage, Alaska.
βHe stated that in his thirty-six years among the Eskimos,β wrote Dr. Price, βhe had never been able to arrive in time to see a normal birth by a primitive Eskimo woman.β In fact, in many cultures, women give birth without any help. Dr. Price provides us with an outstanding example: βOne Eskimo woman who had married twice, her last husband reported to Dr. Romig and myself that she had given birth to twenty-six children and that several of them had been born during the night and that she had not bothered to waken her husband, but had introduced him to the new baby in the morning.β
All this changed with the advent of βcivilizationβ and western foods. Wrote Price, βBut conditions have changed materially with the new generation of Eskimo girls, born after their parents began to use foods of modern civilization. Many of them are carried to his hospital after they had been in labour for several days.β Price cited the example of a hospital at the Six Nation Reservation at Brantford, Ontario, Canada, used βlargely to care for young Indian women during abnormal childbirth.β
Among βcivilizedβ peoples, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between one and two births out of a hundred ended in the motherβs deathβfrom exhaustion, dehydration, infection, hemorrhage or convulsions. As the typical woman had five to eight pregnancies, her lifetime chance of dying in childbirth was one in eight.
Pain in childbirth was considered Godβs punishment for Eveβs sin of eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Not surprisingly, women regarded pregnancy with great fear, βthe evel hour I look forward to with dread,β as one American colonist wrote in her diary. And if a woman survived the birth, she often faced the death of her child in infancy. Typically, three children in ten died before the age of five.
Mortality rates reached very high levels in maternity institutions in the 1800s, sometimes climbing to 40 percent of women giving birth. The outcome was considerably better for home births with midwives assisting the delivery. One midwife, Martha Ballard, who practiced in Augusta, Maine between 1785 and 1812, delivered almost one thousand women with only four recorded fatalities.
-Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Childcare by Sally Fallon Morell and Dr. Tom S Cowan, MD
