Real natural childbirth involves “minimal enough problems” if you don’t particularly value the lives of individual babies, a significant minority of whom would

Real natural childbirth involves “minimal enough problems” if you don’t particularly value the lives of individual babies, a significant minority of whom would die during birth or late pregnancy if we just let nature take its course. And putting “natural” in quotes is entirely appropriate when discussing most vaginal births, even drug free vaginal births, in the first world. There’s nothing natural about 9 months of prenatal care and monitoring, careful observation of the fetal heartbeat during labor, prophylactic administration of antibiotics to women with group B strep, early delivery of women with gestational diabetes or pre-eclampsia, and the availability of c-section any time labor starts to go south. The women who end up delivering vaginally have very good outcomes, in part because a bunch of “unnatural” interventions before the moment of delivery weeded out all the women and babies who would not have done so well. If you want to see what real natural childbirth looks like, you can look at the maternal and neonatal outcomes in countries without modern health care. It’s not pretty. We need to stop using the world “natural” as some kind of signifier for goodness. “Nature” doesn’t care that lots of tadpoles or lion cubs, or salmon fry don’t make it, and it doesn’t care that lots of human embryos miscarry or lots of babies die in birth. WE care about human babies, and so intervene. Also, is there some reason we wouldn’t gestate fetuses in artificial wombs if that was safer for women and babies? Are we just obliged to suffer and risk our lives for no benefit? Because it’s “our place”, I guess?