Anthropologist analyzes disparity in childbirth 
February 4, 2010 by Amy Woodward
Preganancy gives good depiction of natural selection
Click image to enlarge.
Applying Charles Darwin’s revolutionary concept of natural selection to childbirth, one of the leading experts in anthropology explored why humans give birth in such a complicated way.
Karen Rosenberg, chair of the department of anthropology at The University of Delaware, gave her lecture as part of the University Lecture Series at the Barrick Museum on Tuesday.
Her discussion examined why women of different cultures give birth in different ways. Discussing why human childbirth is more complicated due to our evolutionary history, Rosenberg used Darwin and historical, cultural and physical contexts to explain the dangers of human childbirth.
“Darwin made a story about how humans are different than other apes…[but Darwin] never talked about pregnancy or childbirth,” Rosenberg said.
Rosenberg said pregnancy is the one area where it’s easy to see how natural selection is operating.
Austin Petit, a freshman majoring in psychology, attended the lecture for extra credit for Anthropology 101.
“It was very interesting. I didn’t know [childbirth] was so complicated,” Petit said.
Rosenberg explained that 30 percent of babies born in the United States are delivered by cesarean section. The World Health Organization’s recommendation is 12 percent.
The disparity, Rosenberg said is because that many women want and ask for the procedure.
“I have no idea why,” Rosenberg said, emphasizing that the percentage is not a positive number.
The dangers of human childbirth, for mother and child, are numerous, Rosenberg said. For other animals, primates included, it can be much less stressful and risky.
Rosenberg conveyed the dangers of childbirth to the audience by showing graphic slides of a mother who died in labor.
“For most of the past, women were likely to die during childbirth,” she said. “[This is] a reflection of natural selection acting on this period of the human life cycle.”
Childbirth can be dangerous due to several evolutionary adaptations unique to our species, including bipedalism, large brain size and the helplessness of newborns.
Rosenberg showed pictures of ancient pottery and medieval European woodcuts depicting childbirth, meant to illustrate the universality of how women give birth in social contexts.
Much of Rosenberg’s work revolves around finding if we have benefited through history by having assistance through childbirth.
Anthropologists are unsure of the answer to this question.
Modern human childbirth evolved in a mosaic way, Rosenberg said.
“I’m ready to nominate childbirth as evidence of non-intelligent design,” Rosenberg joked.
“Early hominids would have benefited [from assisted childbirth], Rosenberg said, “but that’s as far as I’m going to go.”
I hope Ms. Rosenberg was either misquoted or will do some additional research. The disparity between our current cesarean rate and the WHO recommendations is not being caused by maternal-request elective cesareans, as this article implies.