Childbirth in the Mid-19th Century

In my current work-in-progress I have two female characters who are pregnant, one for the eighth time and the other for the ninth. And they are only in their early thirties. This was not at all unusual for the mid-19th century. Pregnancy and childbirth in the 1860s were common . . . and a common cause of death.

As one article states,

“When men and women married in the 1830s they generally assumed that children would follow promptly and regularly. The prevailing sense was that children just ‘came’ and that there was little to be done about it.”

During the 19th century, the average woman gave birth to six to eight children, not counting miscarriages and stillbirths. Labor could go on for a day or two, because breech and transverse positions could not be changed. Many women were undernourished, resulting in poor pelvic structures. And forceps caused as many problems as they helped. Childbirth resulted in death for one out of every eight women. Infections and fever due to lack of sterilization and uncontrollable bleeding caused many deaths.

In addition to death, the pain of childbirth was greatly feared by women of the time. Anesthetics such as chloroform began to be used in the mid-19th century, but were not really accepted until after Queen Victoria started using chloroform in 1853 for her eighth child, Prince Leopold. But it was some time before anesthetics were available for most women.

Part of the reason for the slow adoption of anesthetics was the proclamation in Genesis that women were destined to labor in pain and sorrow. But in 1907, in his book Maternity, Dr. Henry Davidson Fry described how this argument was addressed by Sir James Y. Simpson after Queen Victoria’s use of chloroform:

“The Scottish clergy reviled Simpson for his work in opposition to the primeval curse, ‘In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children.’ He turned their shaft to ridicule by reminding them that the first operation recorded in history was performed under anesthesia, since when God created Eve from one of Adam’s ribs, he ‘caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam.’”

“Good enough for God, good enough for the Queen, good enough for you,” comments Therese O’Neill in The Week, “How to give birth (100 years ago),” December 18, 2013.

In my novels, I have described difficult childbirths, a stillborn child, children’s deaths, and a woman’s death. Still, after reading the articles linked to in this post, I think I have underplayed the travails of my female characters. They suffer pain, and they seem to spend as many months pregnant as not, but only one of my characters in four books died in childbirth.

I don’t want to change my current work-in-progress, but maybe another woman will die in a future novel. All for the sake of historical accuracy.

How realistic do you want your fiction, when the past was often gruesome?