WAS DEATH IN CHILDBIRTH ACTUALLY COMMON for aristocratic women in England in the past? Some very famous women in English history have died as the result of pregnancy or childbirth, including Queen Elizabeth of York, Queen Jane Seymour, Queen Catherine Parr, Princess Charlotte of Wales and the author, Charlotte Bronte, but equally many women had huge numbers of children and lived to tell the tale, even if not all of their children did. See for example Queen Anne, Queen Caroline of Ansbach, Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and Queen Victoria. So what’s the deal here? Was childbirth really that dangerous, or have its risks been blown out of proportion by those who only focus on the stories that had tragic endings? In this medical history documentary from History Calling, we look at the history of childbirth including statistics for maternal mortality in the early modern period. I’ll also compare them to modern statistics covering England to try to get to the truth. We’ll discuss the question of why women died in childbirth or shortly afterwards and whether being rich actually put a woman at greater risk because she was more likely to face the intervention of early-modern doctors. Along the way I’ll tell you some of the stories of women who tragically passed away during or shortly after labour and others of women who survived many childbirths.
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Judith Lewis, ‘“Tis a Misfortune to Be a Great Ladie”: Maternal Mortality in the British Aristocracy, 1558-1959’ in Journal of British Studies 37 (1998), pp 26-53.
Modern UK maternal mortality rates
https://www.npeu.ox.ac.uk/mbrrace-uk/data-brief/maternal-mortality-2020-2022
Time lapse of global maternal mortality rates, 1985-2020
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/maternal-mortality-ratio-who-gho?time=2020
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