While women in the developing world are dying in childbirth, why are we fetishising doing it at home?
Even if earthly arrangements were, in every other respect, irreproachable, human parturition would be fatal to the theory of intelligent design. Unless, as someone has recently speculated, God is a psychopath as well as a top designer, who chose to punish women for original sin by tearing up an earlier scheme for pain-free birth. Whatever the reason – divine malice, or the evolutionary conflict between big brains and pelvises tilted for walking upright – the consequences for at least 529,000 women a year are fatal. The World Health Organisation has estimated that this may be only half the true number. As you’d expect, the deaths are unevenly spread. “In some developing regions”, the WHO reported recently, “a woman has a one in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy and childbirth. This compares with a one in 2,800 risk for a woman from a developed region.” A risk so low as to seem, to many women in those developed regions, completely negligible. Natural childbirth campaigners routinely challe
