ABSTRACT
This chapter will provide a contemporary review of an evolutionary perspective on human birth taking as our starting point the first paper that we wrote together on the subject in 1995. In the quarter-century since that paper was published there has been a great deal of research and new findings that contribute to an updated understanding of how human birth evolved and the implications for how women give birth today. Additional data that have added to our model of the evolution of human childbirth have come from several areas: 1) An increase in published accounts of birth in nonhuman primates, 2) new discoveries and revised interpretations of human fossils that provide information about birth in our ancestors, 3) recognition of the importance of social support in all aspects of human reproduction and childrearing, and 4) increased understanding of the energetics and physiology of pregnancy and childbirth in humans. Although the fundamentals of our early paper have not substantially changed, the details are being more fully fleshed out because of the new information cited above. An additional influence on our thinking about the evolution of human childbirth, over the last 25 years has been the incorporation of perspectives from the field of evolutionary medicine, which has explicitly stimulated the integration of evolutionary theory in medicine. Although we do not consider normal childbirth to be a “medical event,” in Western countries today birth often takes place in a medical context and may be highly medicalized. In some cases, this has benefitted mothers and infants by reducing both maternal and infant mortality, but medical intervention has probably occurred more often than necessary, creating additional problems for both mothers and their offspring. In this paper, we will present an evolutionary perspective on human birth that will reinforce the notion that birth is a normal, non-pathological event that need not be medicalized and that, like much of human life history takes place in a social context.
