Human birthing is difficult and there is a reason for that. If there was ever an original sin, it wasn’t reaching for the apple; it was reaching for it on two feet.
Rightfully named so, the vertebra upon which the skull directly rests, is called the atlas, and below it, lies a whole frame designed to support this globe. Like Atlas, our whole bodies are burdened with the weight of the world – our brains – and the demands of leading a life on two feet whilst having to balance a head whose volume is three times greater than in our greatest furry counterpart – almost 10% of our total body mass - have forced our hominoid bodies to completely restructure themselves from a biomechanical standpoint.
… and these heads must come out of our ever-narrowing Homo female pelvises.
As a result of these architectural shuffles, ‘taking a bite of the forbidden fruit’ can have physically painful consequences, and assuring our species’ continuity while sporting big brains and standing tall must come at a price. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are 529,000 maternal deaths per year worldwide – only 1% of these occuring in the developed world. Obstructed labour, which relates to disproportions in the head to pelvis ratio (thereby making it physically impossible for the baby to pass between the mother’s pelvis) accounts for 8% of deaths, or 42,000 women, worldwide (!).
It seems that our most powerful resource is the hardest one to deliver – so much so that our pelvises must unhinge themselves during this event. In order for the bony head and shoulders to pass through Eve’s Ivory Gates, our large heads and shoulders must perform a specific sequence of maneuvers, as does the female pelvis – while a gap between the pubic bones of 4-5 mm is normal, in pregnancy a total width of up to 9 mm can be seen between the two bones (that’s almost one entire centimeter!).
Occasionally, however, delivering a new life can involve more than a mere unbuttoning of the pelvis at its seam, but a more violent rupture of it. Indeed, in some extreme cases, the pelvis can actually separate entirely, a condition – “postpartum symphyseal diastasis” – that causes much pain, but that about 45% of all pregnant women and 25% of all women postpartum suffer from. Other times, however, it is the offspring who must pay the price for their ‘mega-encephalized’ heads, and archaeological evidence shows that fetuses have sometimes had their limbs severed in order to extract them from the womb for being too large for their mothers’ cradle…
Not so surprisingly perhaps, this epicentre of life is the one female body part that gets plundered the most – not only from the inside out but also from the outside in.
For numerous evolutionary and biological reasons, wombs are prized possessions which must be kept, protected, controlled, and forced into submission. In the most extreme of cases, or situations of war, where dominance is key, rape, mutilation, and torture of women often serves as a powerful weapon for terrorizing, shaming and demoralizing a people. In 2005, Doctors Without Borders admitted 1,292 women who were victims of sexual violence in the DRC and as many again in the first six months of 2006 ; more than 3,500 women and girls have been raped in the first six months of 2008, the most affected age group being between the ages of 19 and 45 (53.6 percent of the population).
Biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig Palmer, state that they “[...] fervently believe that, just as the leopard’s spots and the giraffe’s elongated neck are the results of aeons of past Darwinian selection, so is rape [...]. There is no doubt that rape has evolutionary — and hence genetic – origins”. In support of their arguments, and since procreation is the ultimate goal driving rape, is the fact that the majority of rape victims are young women at the peak of their fertility.
But really? Then what to make of systematic gang-rapes, mutilations, fistulas, forced incest, rape of pre-pubescent women, etc, which go against any evolutionary reasonings I can think of? – especially of the “procreation” reasoning…
Whatever this all means, it seems that 200,000 thousand years ago, our own bipedal Eve bred her own continuity along with her own demise, as she released 6 billion trojan horses into the world – genetically speaking – some even evolving to turn against her. It looks like our ‘gateways’ to earth, are also gateways to hell, as each one of us brings a new bundle of mutations into the world, and with it, a new possible evolutionary road. Each new life is a potential population founder, and each new woman a potential Eve.
As humanity’s genesis occurs between our legs, both good and bad sprout from between them in both equally as painful deliverances. But no matter how good we are, what sex we are, or if we are newborns or grown-ups, as a result of our blown-up, machiavellic brains balanced atop an erect frame, we are, in one way or another, forever breaking Eve…
