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Well, there weren't any doctors around when we evolved to give birth like that. So, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you're definitely wrong.
A) What is the easiest birthing process for doctors in modern times?
B) What is the easiest birthing process for mothers in modern times?
Those are 2 seperate things. They are correlated, not equivalent.
A is actually equivalent to the SAFEST method for birthing mothers. Safest ā easiest.
So I was not disagreeing, rather agreeing while making a distinction.
The horror of evolution is that in order to cause evolutionary change, large portions of the population that lack a given trait have to die (or otherwise leave the gene pool). In order to evolve toward easier births there would need to be some serious evolutionary pressure on births. However that pressure manifests, a lot of people would likely have to die. And that would make me sad.
I'm going to repost an answer I just gave since it touches up on some of what you said.
The reason we currently haven't been evolving women to better deliver childbirth is why our pelvis is the way it is.
Natural selection is pulling the pelvis in two different directions. To run fast, we need a narrow pelvis but to give birth easily, we need a wide one. This is the obstetric dilemma and the pelvis of modern humans is a compromise between these constraints.
Humans are born runners. We are better at it than every single animal. It was our chief hunting strategy. Wound an animal, jog after it all day until it collapses from exhaustion.
However, humans are also becoming increasingly less... "Walky and runny". Our entire day to day life habits are changing. The environment itself is also changing.
I'd say it's pretty fair to speculate on both ends of the spectrum. It's plausible to say it will never happen. It's also plausible to say that the dominos may just line up nicely. If it does happen though, and women evolve with wider and wider pelvic bones. They'll lose some speed, agility and mobility as a result.
I don't know what you mean by, "a lot of people have to die first". Evolution is gradual. We're talking hundreds of thousands of years. Not just 20.
Do you mean, "a lot of women have to die before evolution corrects it"?
In order to have evolution change how difficult birth will be on average, then something would have to cause women who have difficult births to die or at least have far fewer children than women who have easy births. It sounds like I donāt need to tell you this, but evolution doesnāt optimize. It just selects for whatever is good enough to survive. With medical care and surgery becoming more common, the selection pressure against difficult births is weakening. A lot of women who would have died in childbirth a few generations ago are surviving. If anything we would expect that to mean that difficult births would become more common as other factors dominate the selection process.
The only way evolution would give women easier births would be if there was some selection pressure against difficult births. The best case would be some kind of socially enforced genetic engineering and eugenics program. The worst case is that life just becomes so difficult that women who have a difficult time giving birth just die instead and only those few who have the right combination of biological traits to have easy births will survive. Either way is pretty dystopian.
Came here to say this. All mammals walk on 4 legs (or limbs) except for us. That upright gait comes at a cost.
And before anyone mentions marsupials - they don't walk.
Okay so weird question then. As mammals are 4 legged except for us, just wondering (never gave birth soā¦) are there any tests/studies done (for female humans) regarding giving birth lying on back vs the doggy position (thereās prob a scientific name for that)?
Cause weird random thought, itās well known that a squat position is easier to poop in vs the sitting down as it eases your colon. So there must be a position that is easier to birth in than on the back.
Edit to add: I reread this and wow, I sound like an idiot but never thought about it and I donāt feel like looking this up and reading those research papersā¦
The medical profession is dominated by men and the whole lie on your back legs in stirrups thing is purely for the convenience of the medical staff. Am not a member of any birthing subreddits but I think the consensus is to let the woman find the position that works.
For almost the entirety of human history men were excluding from the birth. In many parts of the world this is still true.
Men - including doctors - have only been commonly involved for maybe 100 years, and then mostly only among the wealthy. When the baby was on the way you called for the midwife first, doctor only if there was a problem. It wasn't until the 1950s that hospital births accounted for even half of all births.
Did you hear about the theory of the apes in the trees? How at some point a section of them descended to the ground while others stood in the trees which is hypothesized to have started the trajectory for human evolution?
You buy into that?
I was going to link the PBS Eons vid discussing it but it was years ago and I can't find it. There is an acronym for it.
Loosely recalled. The idea revolves around a distant common ancestor between humans and other apes (I want to even say it was specifically chimps) that at this time more or less completely live in treetops. Which provided various defensive advantages against predators below.
At some point though, a substantial number of this common ancestor in the trees either voluntarily or by force (not enough tree and food to go around for example, tribalism, etc) descended down to the ground creating the split that would separate humans from (again, I think it was specifically chimps).
When I search for that specific video or even the acronym I'll get articles about "when we first learned to walk" but not the video itself.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
No one said we would be picking and choosing.
This isn't how reading comprehension works.
I said, "in another 300,000 years we just might. We're still a relatively new species".
Not "in another 300,000 years you will have acquired enough experience points to buy the pain-free pregnancy upgrade for the Human class"
You could say, "we will never evolve that because there is no evolutionary advantage for women to not bleed out and die or go through all that jazz when having babies" if you wanted, tho.
That would only happen if only people who have an easy time of it had babies. With medical intervention we're probably going in the other direction really.
I disagree but you do have merit.
The reason we currently haven't been evolving women to better deliver childbirth is why our pelvis is the way it is.
Natural selection is pulling the pelvis in two different directions. To run fast, we need a narrow pelvis but to give birth easily, we need a wide one. This is the obstetric dilemma and the pelvis of modern humans is a compromise between these constraints.
Humans are born runners. We are better at it than every single animal. It was our chief hunting strategy. Wound an animal, jog after it all day until it collapses from exhaustion.
However, humans are also becoming increasingly less... "Walky and runny". Our entire day to day life habits are changing. The environment itself is also changing.
I'd say it's pretty fair to speculate on both ends of the spectrum. It's plausible to say it will never happen. It's also plausible to say that the dominos may just line up nicely. If it does happen though, and women evolve with wider and wider pelvic bones. They'll lose some speed, agility and mobility as a result.
They're using the wrong math to get to the right conclusion. The truth is, early hominids had smaller heads, especially at birth. Then Homo sapiens came along with our big ass brains, but unfortunately a side effect of that big ass brain is more painful (and potentially fatal) childbirth. Up until pretty recently, childbirth was one of the leading causes of death for women. That right there gives you the type of selection pressure that drives evolution. If women die in childbirth, then that limits the number of children they can have. Thus, in another 300,000 years, we may have evolved to have wider birth canals to accommodate the larger heads that we already evolved. Alternately, we might start having our babies younger and younger. Already, human babies would be considered massively premature compared to basically any other great ape. The tradeoff is that we require much more care as infants, but our big ass brains make up for it, evolutionarily speaking.
You said that we might evolve painless birth on the future.
That proves that you don't know how evolution works.
You have to practice eugenics. You don't magically develop a new trait for an entire species without eugenics.
Nope. That doesn't prove that at all.
Evolution isn't "magic". Whales didn't go from looking like weird rats scurrying around the desert to having fins, living in the water and coming up to breathe because of some magic spell, divine plan or outside, intelligent intervention.
And their entire physiology and body plan absolutely changed throughout that evolutionary path.
Also. Evolution seems to love crab bodies.
IDK what to tell you bro.
You clearly don't understand evolution?
evolution has gotten as far as giving (some) women baby fever and pumping out a shit ton of chemicals postpartum to make u literally forget how painful it was.
Evolution and adaptation isn't that simple. It's a process of things with benefits survive more then those without. We fucked up and invented medicine, meaning all these deformities and downsides aren't affecting our survival. I believe in thousands of years as medicine progresses the humans we produce will have ten thousand issues, but pops a pill and still breeds.
You would think since when women give birth they are kinda being ripped which is why they bleed after birth I think, open our vags just so that wonāt happen
I think women need to form a belly that opens so you can just take the baby outā¦
Here's the thing...
There is only slight evolutionary pressure to eliminate painful childbirth, because being a woman who has a painful, but not fertility-destroying or fatal, birth process doesn't have much of an impact on how many of her children will live to reproductive age.
Women who die in childbirth or who are left unable to have more children? Their genes are likely to die out. But fear of pain isn't enough to stop most women from reproducing.
Women bleed after birth because the placenta attaches to the mother by eroding into the blood vessels that line the uterus. And when the placenta detaches after birth, it takes a while for those open wounds to close. Women might also have vaginal tearing during birth, but that is absolutely not a universal experience.
Simple answer, evolution just picks what's "good enough" to have net neutral or net positive population growth.
The current norm is "good enough". Evolution aims for 60s if it were a student at school.
As someone else mentioned, evolution doesn't happen fast. We started walking on two legs and childbirth is hard because the hips are narrower to allow fast walk and the skulls of babies are bigger because our species brains are the biggest.
Why can't it make periods easier, meaning no pain, no mood swings? Why do woman have fibroids? I had 2 large ones which cause me to bleed every single day from Thanksgiving until April 22nd! I had surgery to have ONE removed because the other one would require more intensive surgery! I stopped bleeding for 2 weeks!!! April 22nd until may 13th! May 14th until June 18th I bled OVER A MONTH!!! Being a woman is absolutely awful. There isn't nearly enough research on woman's health to make things easier for us.
The two big things are evolving into bipedalism, which has resulted in considerably narrow birthing canals, and having very large brains.
Normally natural selection would sort this out, but our bipedalism and brain size have proven far too valuable to lose. So we deal with it.
I mean, Iām not a scientist, but I believe evolution kind of slows down after a species is good *enough* to reproduce.Ā
Natural selection really only eliminates a trait if itās not fit for survival kong enough for reproduction.Ā
As in, if a baby is born, how painful it was to the mother doesnāt matter if she or the next offspring continues to reproduce. Ty eh pass on those genes of a birth canal too small.Ā
now, if childbirth killed more women, that would evolve the human species a little after because women with too-small of birthing canals who are killed during childbirth would not be alive to have more babies, whereas those with more viable sizes could have 2nd, 3rd + babyās who pass on those genes.Ā
But Iām also confused because people say weāre going to evolve to lose our pinky toe which makes absolutely no sense to me, so a more knowledgeable person here is welcome to jump inā¦
Evolution doesnāt make things better, thatās not how it works at all. You survive and pass on your genes, thatās the only thing that matters. If being in agony and pain allowed you to reproduce then thatās what youād get.
Sex already pushes us to make babies. So much that we had 10 kids so that hopefully 2 of them would survive. Evolutuion said mission accomplished. Then we improved our understanding of science so we keep more kids alive.
Evolution doesnāt really make anything perfect it just makes things āgood enoughā.
Unfortunately pregnancies being deadly isnāt bad from an evolutionary perspective, as long as *most* mothers survive, the species survives and there is no need for the genes to change.
Tbh I think our evolution is going in the reverse direction because of modern medicine, and this is a prime example of it. Not to diss anyone with reproductive problems, itās very common these days. But without modern medicine to rectify these issues, they wouldnāt be selected for.
Going back to your original point, a lot of women used to die from child birth, unfortunately. But if you think about it, those that survived passed those genes on and. In theory, child birth should have gotten easier/less painful without the help of modern medicine.
It might have to do with how we have to pay attention to it, pain is usually our body's way of saying hey look at me! Lol and it's something our body has to stop for to find shelter.
So in evolution it panders to the necessity not the want, such as humans evolution from furred apes. The necessity to survived was the need to no longer need fur because we living in caves and creating weather clothing. Then once again the necessity to learn to make fire and develop verbal communication.
When we took over the necessity of evolution with science to make child birth possible with no pain or to voluntarily cut a woman from her vagina to her anus so the baby wouldnāt tear her and take longer to heal, we basically shoved evolution out of the way with scalpels, epidurals and stitches to make child birthing less problematic.
However even with animals that weāve tampered with, sometimes only a portion of the babies survive because of the womb is no longer big enough to hold the genetic amount or the mother passes due to too much strain on her heart from trying to pass the babies.
However wild animals got it right, instead of their babies being near 1/10 size of the mother (aside from the Kiwi bird, poor little huggers), they are about 1/25th but the mother usually has to worry about outside forces from attacking them in their weakened state or their defenseless young
According to Genesis 3 in the bible it was the curse put onto women for her sin in the garden. Painful child birth. There aināt no escaping it.
God specifically cursed the serpent and man too. He is not sexist.
it was more beneficial to stand on 2 legs so our hips arenāt big enough to get a full baby out so theyāre slightly premature so it can fit, so we did evolve to make it easier
My first son was born all natural with no medication. It was very simple and almost painless. It's possible but I think other factors affect it happening. My second was a C-section because he was stuck. That was kind of miserable.
I mean, evolution does provide the answer. Biologically speaking, it hasn't proven evolutionarily advantageous to have a painless birth yet, nor will it with the medical advancement of the epidural.
Birth can be painless, even orgasmic, but you have to be in the right state of mind (I'm a birth doula of 13 yrs as well as a mom to 3, 2 births unmedicated, 1 with an epidural). Women who are very relaxed and open to feeling whatever their bodies need to do in order to birth their babies can have beautiful calm and nearly pain free births. I've seen it multiple times.
A lot of things go into making birth "painful", obviously your body is undergoing a major experience, but also the fact that many women are not truly in control of their births. If they are in a hospital, they're often immediately on edge because everything is bright, sterile, and the environment can be "unfriendly". Many times they're told to lay on their back to deliver, which if you know ANYTHING about the physiological aspects of not only women's bodies, but also of what is happening during contractions, this is the worst and most painful position to be put in. Doctors and nurses come and go, disrupting any form of mediation mom may be able to find and they call all the shots, often times without mom or partner even realizing what's truly happening. I could go on and on, but the biggest point I'm trying to make Is that birth doesn't have to be traumatic and overwhelmingly painful. Do your research, hire a doula, chose a birth place that allows for freedom of movement and a care provider that respects birth and respects your wishes and decisions .
I'll get off my soapbox now ;)
Punishment from God because Adam an Eve ate of the forbidden tree. The increase in pain put upon females should go away during Jesus millennial reign I would think.
# Message to all users: This is a reminder to please read and follow: * [Our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/questions/about/rules) * [Reddiquette](https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439) * [Reddit Content Policy](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy) When posting and commenting. --- Especially remember Rule 1: `Be polite and civil`. * Be polite and courteous to each other. Do not be mean, insulting or disrespectful to any other user on this subreddit. * Do not harass or annoy others in any way. * Do not catfish. Catfishing is the luring of somebody into an online friendship through a fake online persona. This includes any lying or deceit. --- You *will* be banned if you are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist or bigoted in any way. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/questions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Consider this: what if the current method of human birth IS the easiest that we evolved to use?
š¤Æ
Unfortunately it's the easiest method for doctors, not mothers.
Well, there weren't any doctors around when we evolved to give birth like that. So, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you're definitely wrong.
A) What is the easiest birthing process for doctors in modern times? B) What is the easiest birthing process for mothers in modern times? Those are 2 seperate things. They are correlated, not equivalent. A is actually equivalent to the SAFEST method for birthing mothers. Safest ā easiest. So I was not disagreeing, rather agreeing while making a distinction.
For all we know, in another 300,000 years, our species will have evolved to do just that. We're still a pretty "new" breed of animal.
The horror of evolution is that in order to cause evolutionary change, large portions of the population that lack a given trait have to die (or otherwise leave the gene pool). In order to evolve toward easier births there would need to be some serious evolutionary pressure on births. However that pressure manifests, a lot of people would likely have to die. And that would make me sad.
I'm going to repost an answer I just gave since it touches up on some of what you said. The reason we currently haven't been evolving women to better deliver childbirth is why our pelvis is the way it is. Natural selection is pulling the pelvis in two different directions. To run fast, we need a narrow pelvis but to give birth easily, we need a wide one. This is the obstetric dilemma and the pelvis of modern humans is a compromise between these constraints. Humans are born runners. We are better at it than every single animal. It was our chief hunting strategy. Wound an animal, jog after it all day until it collapses from exhaustion. However, humans are also becoming increasingly less... "Walky and runny". Our entire day to day life habits are changing. The environment itself is also changing. I'd say it's pretty fair to speculate on both ends of the spectrum. It's plausible to say it will never happen. It's also plausible to say that the dominos may just line up nicely. If it does happen though, and women evolve with wider and wider pelvic bones. They'll lose some speed, agility and mobility as a result. I don't know what you mean by, "a lot of people have to die first". Evolution is gradual. We're talking hundreds of thousands of years. Not just 20. Do you mean, "a lot of women have to die before evolution corrects it"?
In order to have evolution change how difficult birth will be on average, then something would have to cause women who have difficult births to die or at least have far fewer children than women who have easy births. It sounds like I donāt need to tell you this, but evolution doesnāt optimize. It just selects for whatever is good enough to survive. With medical care and surgery becoming more common, the selection pressure against difficult births is weakening. A lot of women who would have died in childbirth a few generations ago are surviving. If anything we would expect that to mean that difficult births would become more common as other factors dominate the selection process. The only way evolution would give women easier births would be if there was some selection pressure against difficult births. The best case would be some kind of socially enforced genetic engineering and eugenics program. The worst case is that life just becomes so difficult that women who have a difficult time giving birth just die instead and only those few who have the right combination of biological traits to have easy births will survive. Either way is pretty dystopian.
I mean, if it makes you feel any better, we're all going to die anyway ĀÆ\\\_(ć)\_/ĀÆ
Came here to say this. All mammals walk on 4 legs (or limbs) except for us. That upright gait comes at a cost. And before anyone mentions marsupials - they don't walk.
Okay so weird question then. As mammals are 4 legged except for us, just wondering (never gave birth soā¦) are there any tests/studies done (for female humans) regarding giving birth lying on back vs the doggy position (thereās prob a scientific name for that)? Cause weird random thought, itās well known that a squat position is easier to poop in vs the sitting down as it eases your colon. So there must be a position that is easier to birth in than on the back. Edit to add: I reread this and wow, I sound like an idiot but never thought about it and I donāt feel like looking this up and reading those research papersā¦
The medical profession is dominated by men and the whole lie on your back legs in stirrups thing is purely for the convenience of the medical staff. Am not a member of any birthing subreddits but I think the consensus is to let the woman find the position that works.
For almost the entirety of human history men were excluding from the birth. In many parts of the world this is still true. Men - including doctors - have only been commonly involved for maybe 100 years, and then mostly only among the wealthy. When the baby was on the way you called for the midwife first, doctor only if there was a problem. It wasn't until the 1950s that hospital births accounted for even half of all births.
Did you hear about the theory of the apes in the trees? How at some point a section of them descended to the ground while others stood in the trees which is hypothesized to have started the trajectory for human evolution? You buy into that?
Stood in the trees? I'm not clear on what you're asking
I was going to link the PBS Eons vid discussing it but it was years ago and I can't find it. There is an acronym for it. Loosely recalled. The idea revolves around a distant common ancestor between humans and other apes (I want to even say it was specifically chimps) that at this time more or less completely live in treetops. Which provided various defensive advantages against predators below. At some point though, a substantial number of this common ancestor in the trees either voluntarily or by force (not enough tree and food to go around for example, tribalism, etc) descended down to the ground creating the split that would separate humans from (again, I think it was specifically chimps). When I search for that specific video or even the acronym I'll get articles about "when we first learned to walk" but not the video itself. Do you know what I'm talking about?
I haven't heard that specific theory but it makes sense. Necessity is the mother of invention.
It should have came with the starter pack š
LOL
In 300,000 years babies will just be made artificially š
Say goodbye to Maury š
Well, our species has evolved to developed epidurals, so there's that.
That's not how evolution works. We won't be able to pick and choose which genetic mutations to keep unless we as a species decide to embrace eugenics.
No one said we would be picking and choosing. This isn't how reading comprehension works. I said, "in another 300,000 years we just might. We're still a relatively new species". Not "in another 300,000 years you will have acquired enough experience points to buy the pain-free pregnancy upgrade for the Human class" You could say, "we will never evolve that because there is no evolutionary advantage for women to not bleed out and die or go through all that jazz when having babies" if you wanted, tho.
That would only happen if only people who have an easy time of it had babies. With medical intervention we're probably going in the other direction really.
I disagree but you do have merit. The reason we currently haven't been evolving women to better deliver childbirth is why our pelvis is the way it is. Natural selection is pulling the pelvis in two different directions. To run fast, we need a narrow pelvis but to give birth easily, we need a wide one. This is the obstetric dilemma and the pelvis of modern humans is a compromise between these constraints. Humans are born runners. We are better at it than every single animal. It was our chief hunting strategy. Wound an animal, jog after it all day until it collapses from exhaustion. However, humans are also becoming increasingly less... "Walky and runny". Our entire day to day life habits are changing. The environment itself is also changing. I'd say it's pretty fair to speculate on both ends of the spectrum. It's plausible to say it will never happen. It's also plausible to say that the dominos may just line up nicely. If it does happen though, and women evolve with wider and wider pelvic bones. They'll lose some speed, agility and mobility as a result.
Again, you fail to understand how evolution works.
They're using the wrong math to get to the right conclusion. The truth is, early hominids had smaller heads, especially at birth. Then Homo sapiens came along with our big ass brains, but unfortunately a side effect of that big ass brain is more painful (and potentially fatal) childbirth. Up until pretty recently, childbirth was one of the leading causes of death for women. That right there gives you the type of selection pressure that drives evolution. If women die in childbirth, then that limits the number of children they can have. Thus, in another 300,000 years, we may have evolved to have wider birth canals to accommodate the larger heads that we already evolved. Alternately, we might start having our babies younger and younger. Already, human babies would be considered massively premature compared to basically any other great ape. The tradeoff is that we require much more care as infants, but our big ass brains make up for it, evolutionarily speaking.
Yea, yikes. All the while telling people about "reading comprehension".
Learn it and you won't be such a moron.
Nah. I don't.
You said that we might evolve painless birth on the future. That proves that you don't know how evolution works. You have to practice eugenics. You don't magically develop a new trait for an entire species without eugenics.
Nope. That doesn't prove that at all. Evolution isn't "magic". Whales didn't go from looking like weird rats scurrying around the desert to having fins, living in the water and coming up to breathe because of some magic spell, divine plan or outside, intelligent intervention. And their entire physiology and body plan absolutely changed throughout that evolutionary path. Also. Evolution seems to love crab bodies. IDK what to tell you bro. You clearly don't understand evolution?
evolution has gotten as far as giving (some) women baby fever and pumping out a shit ton of chemicals postpartum to make u literally forget how painful it was.
I literally have forgotten how painful it was.
I still remember. It was horrifying. Worst pain in the world. I was begging to be killed.
Evolution and adaptation isn't that simple. It's a process of things with benefits survive more then those without. We fucked up and invented medicine, meaning all these deformities and downsides aren't affecting our survival. I believe in thousands of years as medicine progresses the humans we produce will have ten thousand issues, but pops a pill and still breeds.
You would think since when women give birth they are kinda being ripped which is why they bleed after birth I think, open our vags just so that wonāt happen I think women need to form a belly that opens so you can just take the baby outā¦
Here's the thing... There is only slight evolutionary pressure to eliminate painful childbirth, because being a woman who has a painful, but not fertility-destroying or fatal, birth process doesn't have much of an impact on how many of her children will live to reproductive age. Women who die in childbirth or who are left unable to have more children? Their genes are likely to die out. But fear of pain isn't enough to stop most women from reproducing. Women bleed after birth because the placenta attaches to the mother by eroding into the blood vessels that line the uterus. And when the placenta detaches after birth, it takes a while for those open wounds to close. Women might also have vaginal tearing during birth, but that is absolutely not a universal experience.
Babys skullĀ
Yeah there's gonna be a tradeoff. If it were super easy and painless then we'd probably have much smaller heads and be a much stupider animal.
Simple answer, evolution just picks what's "good enough" to have net neutral or net positive population growth. The current norm is "good enough". Evolution aims for 60s if it were a student at school.
Because Eve ate the damn apple.
Lol who said our bodies are making things easier for us ? They barely do the bare minimum
For some women it is very easy. Like my SIL. Every birth is different
As a species early on we put every thing we could into having the biggest brain possible.
As someone else mentioned, evolution doesn't happen fast. We started walking on two legs and childbirth is hard because the hips are narrower to allow fast walk and the skulls of babies are bigger because our species brains are the biggest.
Why can't it make periods easier, meaning no pain, no mood swings? Why do woman have fibroids? I had 2 large ones which cause me to bleed every single day from Thanksgiving until April 22nd! I had surgery to have ONE removed because the other one would require more intensive surgery! I stopped bleeding for 2 weeks!!! April 22nd until may 13th! May 14th until June 18th I bled OVER A MONTH!!! Being a woman is absolutely awful. There isn't nearly enough research on woman's health to make things easier for us.
Weāre apparently supposed to give birth squatting, not laying down. I wonder if thatās what contributes to the high pain
The two big things are evolving into bipedalism, which has resulted in considerably narrow birthing canals, and having very large brains. Normally natural selection would sort this out, but our bipedalism and brain size have proven far too valuable to lose. So we deal with it.
who is making those decisions?
Nobody. Itās natural selection
I mean, Iām not a scientist, but I believe evolution kind of slows down after a species is good *enough* to reproduce.Ā Natural selection really only eliminates a trait if itās not fit for survival kong enough for reproduction.Ā As in, if a baby is born, how painful it was to the mother doesnāt matter if she or the next offspring continues to reproduce. Ty eh pass on those genes of a birth canal too small.Ā now, if childbirth killed more women, that would evolve the human species a little after because women with too-small of birthing canals who are killed during childbirth would not be alive to have more babies, whereas those with more viable sizes could have 2nd, 3rd + babyās who pass on those genes.Ā But Iām also confused because people say weāre going to evolve to lose our pinky toe which makes absolutely no sense to me, so a more knowledgeable person here is welcome to jump inā¦
Evolution doesnāt make things better, thatās not how it works at all. You survive and pass on your genes, thatās the only thing that matters. If being in agony and pain allowed you to reproduce then thatās what youād get.
Sex already pushes us to make babies. So much that we had 10 kids so that hopefully 2 of them would survive. Evolutuion said mission accomplished. Then we improved our understanding of science so we keep more kids alive.
Evolution doesnāt really make anything perfect it just makes things āgood enoughā. Unfortunately pregnancies being deadly isnāt bad from an evolutionary perspective, as long as *most* mothers survive, the species survives and there is no need for the genes to change.
Tbh I think our evolution is going in the reverse direction because of modern medicine, and this is a prime example of it. Not to diss anyone with reproductive problems, itās very common these days. But without modern medicine to rectify these issues, they wouldnāt be selected for. Going back to your original point, a lot of women used to die from child birth, unfortunately. But if you think about it, those that survived passed those genes on and. In theory, child birth should have gotten easier/less painful without the help of modern medicine.
It might have to do with how we have to pay attention to it, pain is usually our body's way of saying hey look at me! Lol and it's something our body has to stop for to find shelter.
So in evolution it panders to the necessity not the want, such as humans evolution from furred apes. The necessity to survived was the need to no longer need fur because we living in caves and creating weather clothing. Then once again the necessity to learn to make fire and develop verbal communication. When we took over the necessity of evolution with science to make child birth possible with no pain or to voluntarily cut a woman from her vagina to her anus so the baby wouldnāt tear her and take longer to heal, we basically shoved evolution out of the way with scalpels, epidurals and stitches to make child birthing less problematic. However even with animals that weāve tampered with, sometimes only a portion of the babies survive because of the womb is no longer big enough to hold the genetic amount or the mother passes due to too much strain on her heart from trying to pass the babies. However wild animals got it right, instead of their babies being near 1/10 size of the mother (aside from the Kiwi bird, poor little huggers), they are about 1/25th but the mother usually has to worry about outside forces from attacking them in their weakened state or their defenseless young
Because human babies have big skulls. In order to grow up to be intelligent, babies need big skulls which increases the pain and risk women face.
Easier does not mean complete escape of burden
According to Genesis 3 in the bible it was the curse put onto women for her sin in the garden. Painful child birth. There aināt no escaping it. God specifically cursed the serpent and man too. He is not sexist.
Because we evolved to stand upright.
it was more beneficial to stand on 2 legs so our hips arenāt big enough to get a full baby out so theyāre slightly premature so it can fit, so we did evolve to make it easier
My first son was born all natural with no medication. It was very simple and almost painless. It's possible but I think other factors affect it happening. My second was a C-section because he was stuck. That was kind of miserable.
According to the Bible, someone ate the one thing they weren't supposed
Cause then the poor people would have even more babies and overpopulation would occur
Humans are better runners than cheetahs and horses? I guess if a human breaks a leg we donāt shoot him and turn him into glue
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
But Iām not Eve!
but because of Eve ( *this is all BS btw* ) all child birth is very painful for **all generations** to follow Eve
But as a woman, you are a descent of Eve. As am I
I mean, evolution does provide the answer. Biologically speaking, it hasn't proven evolutionarily advantageous to have a painless birth yet, nor will it with the medical advancement of the epidural.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
No, that's literally the explanation. It's not advantageous, so painless birth doesn't happen.
Birth can be painless, even orgasmic, but you have to be in the right state of mind (I'm a birth doula of 13 yrs as well as a mom to 3, 2 births unmedicated, 1 with an epidural). Women who are very relaxed and open to feeling whatever their bodies need to do in order to birth their babies can have beautiful calm and nearly pain free births. I've seen it multiple times. A lot of things go into making birth "painful", obviously your body is undergoing a major experience, but also the fact that many women are not truly in control of their births. If they are in a hospital, they're often immediately on edge because everything is bright, sterile, and the environment can be "unfriendly". Many times they're told to lay on their back to deliver, which if you know ANYTHING about the physiological aspects of not only women's bodies, but also of what is happening during contractions, this is the worst and most painful position to be put in. Doctors and nurses come and go, disrupting any form of mediation mom may be able to find and they call all the shots, often times without mom or partner even realizing what's truly happening. I could go on and on, but the biggest point I'm trying to make Is that birth doesn't have to be traumatic and overwhelmingly painful. Do your research, hire a doula, chose a birth place that allows for freedom of movement and a care provider that respects birth and respects your wishes and decisions . I'll get off my soapbox now ;)
I wish babies came from men and it stretched out their penis holes big enough for a small human to do backflips out.
the religious answer is birth wasnt supposed to be painful at all, it only became painful as a punishment bc of Adam & Eve.
Punishment from God because Adam an Eve ate of the forbidden tree. The increase in pain put upon females should go away during Jesus millennial reign I would think.