Childbirth mortality rates have been bad at most points in history. In many cases, doing nothing would have been preferable to the Freakier Than Fiction truth — they thought the best way to assist a difficult birth was to get a group to hold the mother's torso upright and then shake her up and down to help the baby "fall out". The Catholic Church told pregnant women to prepare for their deaths due to the risks involved in childbirth.
The ritual of "churching" was performed for women when they had recovered; it was a thanksgiving for the woman's survival, even if the child had died.
Before World War I, it was statistically more dangerous for a woman to give birth than it was for a man to fight in a war. The three things that changed the proportions were penicillin, modern weapons, and washing hands. Until relatively recent times the main cause of death in childbirth was puerperal fever—that is, a septicemia caused by the bacteria on the midwife or obstetrician's hands. In those time it was common for the doctors to work with other patients or even dissect the corpses and then visit a pregnant woman without even washing their hands. Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweiss was the first to notice the correlation between clean hands and decreased risk of the dreaded fever, and introduced the strict regimen of cleanliness in his clinic. Unfortunately, he was basically laughed out of profession by other physicians, because of course nothing bad can come from that rotting corpse the doc was dissecting before going to deliver a baby... It wasn't until James Lister that medics started to take aseptics seriously.
According to popular folklore, the only Spartans with their names on their tombstones were those who died doing their greatest duty; men who died in battle and women who died in childbirth.
Similar with the Aztecs: Women who died in childbirth were considered heroines the same way as men who either died in battle or were sacrificed to the gods. The tombstone of one of them would become a shrine, and if the baby died as well, the dead mom's hands would be cut off and placed next to the baby's corpse as if they were holding him/her.
And again similar with the Vikings — historians believe that death in childbirth for the Vikings was equivalent to death in battle, and guaranteed entry into Valhalla.
Saint Raymond Nonnatus's myth says that the "Nonnatus" name was given to him since his mother died during childbirth and baby Raymond had to be pulled out through a C-section, said to have been performed by Raymond's own father. Raymond is the patron saint of pregnant women, midwives, babies and anything related to childbirth: churches and parishes of the Mercedary Order often have altars dedicated to him alone, which tend to be covered in offers and written prayers from pregnant women who ask Raymond to tell God to protect them, plus photos of babies whose families prayed to him to make sure they'd be born safely.
For many species of plants and insects, death by childbirth is considered natural. The production of seeds or babies would drain so much resources that the mother would quickly die of starvation. The mother (and/or father) may be designed to die after reproduction, so as not to take up the children's food.
The young of the sea louse eat their mother alive from the inside out. See the Animals entry under Nightmare Fuel.
Octopodes. Contrary to popular belief, they do not die of starvation, but from accelerated aging triggered by their optic "suicide glands" after mating. See also Death by Sex.
It's often thought that Julius Caesar was born by Caesarian section and therefore that his mother had died in childbirth (since Caesarians were 100% fatal to the mother at that date). Unfortunately for people who like to believe in Urban Legends, Caesar's mother survived his birth for many years, and the term "Caesarian section" derives from the Latin caedere, to cut. "Caesar" probably means "grey-eyed" or "elephant", and was the dictator's family name for 300 years before his birth. The words do not seem to be related, although many authorities are convinced they are.
The "natural" level of maternal mortality in humans is 1 in 100 births. In sub-Saharan Africa, 1 in 16 women are said to die in childbirth, compared to 1 in 2,800 in the developed world. Keep in mind, though, that these numbers may be wildly optimistic; in many African countries the poorest citizens, the ones most likely to die of such things as post-partum infections, live and die uncounted and unregistered.
In 17th century England childbirth was (outside of the plague years) the most common cause of death in women. One historian estimated that one in four London women died of pregnancy or childbirth-related matters. This long before the "medicalization" of childbirth.
Notable women who died in childbirth include: the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; two of Henry VII's six wives, Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr (though Catherine outlived Henry and the child, Mary, pretty much disappeared from history after the execution of her birth father Thomas Seymour); Emperor Charles V's wife Isabella of Portugal, plus their daughter-in-law Maria Manuela of Portugal (wife of Charles' son and eventual successor in the Spanish throne, Philip II); Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt (first wife of Teddy), Julia (Julius Caesar's daughter), Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal (the Taj Mahal was built in her honour by her husband, Emperor Shah Jahan), American writer and feminist Jean Webster (author of Daddy Long Legs), Martina von Trapp (one of the Von Trapp kids), Mexican actress Marla Hiromi Hayakawa, Canadian singer and voice actress Michal Friedman (wife of Dan Green), Serbian sports shooter and three-times world champion Bobana Velickovic, American artist Abigail May "Abby" Alcott (sister of Little Women's Louisa May Alcott, who helped raise her daughter Lulu) etc.. And while she wasn't apparently blamed for it, Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, also named Mary, arguably had issues...seeing as she grew up to become Mary Shelley and write Frankenstein, and according to a story, she wanted to, uh, get to know Percy Bysshe Shelley (her future husband) better when they met... over her mother's grave.
It's said that Kim Jong-Suk, first wife of the North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, died while giving birth to a stillborn kid. Other versions say that she was shot dead, others that she died of tuberculosis, etc. The "official" one says that she passed away "after enduring many harships as a guerrilla warrior"
This trope was, unlikely as it may sound, a key factor in the ultimate conquest of Wales by the English. Llewelyn ap Gruffyd, the last native Prince of Wales, was allowed to wed Eleanor de Montfort, to whom he was betrothed, in exchange for some concessions to her cousin, King Edward I. One of the concessions was that he cease resisting the English rule, and essentially act as Edward's governor in Wales; Llewelyn agreed out of love for Eleanor. Unfortunately, around four years later she died giving birth to their only child, Princess Gwenllian, and Llewelyn kind of lost it. His younger brother Dafydd took advantage of his overwhelming grief to persuade Llewelyn to stage one last, dangerous campaign against the English, which they very much lost. Llewelyn was killed in the skirmish; Dafydd was captured and taken to London, where he had the dubious distinction of being the first person in recorded history to be hung, drawn and quartered; and the infant princess was kidnapped, taken to England, and raised in a convent to become a nun (like Daffyd's own daughter)
The Safe Motherhood Quilt Project was created to honor the memory of women who died from childbirth-related causes, as well as raise awareness, since maternal death tends to go unreported in the United States.
Journalist Jessica Valenti of The Guardian expressed her concern that women who choose to sacrifice their lives to give birth (refusing chemo if they have cancer, telling the doctor to save the baby instead of them if complications arise) are sending a negative message to all girls and women, that the choice in and of itself is antifeminist and that women are simply conditioned to believe they exist only to birth babies.
