How can society develop if death in childbirth was more common?

The moon is made of a substance called warpstone, which bathes the planet in magical radiation. The rate of energy put out by the moon changes througout the years with no pattern. While the ozone layer provides some protection, it still causes problems for humanity in the form of mutation. This disease results in the growth of extra limbs, eyes, organs, and other parts of the body. This will eventually cause the person do devolve into a mindless creature called an aberration, which are extremely dangerous.

Mutations are rare in fully grown adults, and can often be treated. In contrast, fetuses are at significant risk of turning into these aberrations. These creatures eat there way out of the mother, which is usually fatal. It is customary for midwives to help in the process. These are witches who use a form of herbal magic and charms to assist in a successful and normal birth, reversing any mutations that the child possesses, or at least save the mother by aborting it. Although these have been known to work in some cases, dying in childbirth is still very common. Rate of deaths are inconsistent, being anywhere from 15% - 50%.

With maternal mortality rate being extremely high even during its lowest period, how can society develop?

How dark do you want your setting to be?

- At the lighter end, women might shield themselves from the lunar radiation by hiding in caves while pregnant. Since underground monsters are a thing, this might be bad in other ways.

- People might contract non-human outsiders to bear children instead of using human women for heirs. Hello Tiefling Empire.

- People might turn themselves into Elan or Vampires (or other similar inhuman immortal) to help preserve knowledge across inconsistent generations. Society would be embodied in these elders.

- At the darker end, people might wage war to steal women from other tribes, to beget heirs upon disposable women. People might turn captured enemy warriors into women (creating a setting-specific baleful polymorph variant) to create more disposable women.

With a 50% child mortality rate that includes a significant risk to the mother, society will certainly decline and the population will experience strong negative growth. Even at 10% this is likely going to occur, doubly so if the mothers have any strong say in it. Any society that survives under these conditions will have developed significant mitigating factors.

According to this guy a mother needs to produce four children who survive to adulthood between puberty and menopause. Assuming that time is betweem 14 and 40, that leaves enough time for nine births with two years of nursing between them. If half of those births result in offspring which survives to adulthood, mission accomplished.

A failed pregnancy which leaves the mother alive only takes a year out of her fertile cycle, so it would require multiple miscarriages or infant deaths to impact this average. So, math time:

Each successful pregnancy is followed by two years of nursing before another pregnancy, so 3 years per success. With a 27 year window of fertility that's 9 children.

Each failed pregnancy takes a variable amount of time, from a few months to a few years, out of that time frame. For simplicity I assume arbitrarily that that time averages a year.

Thus:
9 successful pregnancies
8 successes and up to 3 failures.
7 successes and up to 6 failures.
6 successes and up to 9 failures.
5 successes and up to 12 failures.
4 successes and up to 15 failures.

Infant mortality is far less a concern than mother mortality. A rate of 75% infant mortality would be sustainable if the mother is otherwise unaffected and remains healthy and fertile.

Since four is our target number, we won't bother beyond this. But this leaves the question of how many children survive to breeding age? The number of boys is not relevant for this because only one is needed to fertilize a tribe of females. (Gengis Khan, I'm looking at you!) So, we can use expendable boys to defend against lions and rival tribes, and only concern ourselves with the girls. If 25% of girls die childless, that then requires the survivors to have 5 children who survive to adulthood. If 50% die childless, it then requires each successful mother to have 8 children survive to adulthood.

So, if child mortality is less than 25%, and death in childbirth is less than 25%, the surviving mothers are required to produce six children each for the averages to work out to a growing society.

In other words, combined infant, child, and maternal mortality is a non-issue until around 40%. The culture would have to adapt to this reality, but humans are adaptable.

Note: this is a very simplistic analysis which ignores many factors. One could write a dissertation on the subject and barely scratch the surface. My assumptions are very broad and very imprecise. So, take it for what it is, and don't assume it serves any purpose but to broadly explore the OP's question.

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Originally Posted by brian 333

According to this guy a mother needs to produce four children who survive to adulthood between puberty and menopause. Assuming that time is betweem 14 and 40, that leaves enough time for nine births with two years of nursing between them. If half of those births result in offspring which survives to adulthood, mission accomplished.

A failed pregnancy which leaves the mother alive only takes a year out of her fertile cycle, so it would require multiple miscarriages or infant deaths to impact this average. So, math time:

Each successful pregnancy is followed by two years of nursing before another pregnancy, so 3 years per success. With a 27 year window of fertility that's 9 children.

Each failed pregnancy takes a variable amount of time, from a few months to a few years, out of that time frame. For simplicity I assume arbitrarily that that time averages a year.

Thus:
9 successful pregnancies
8 successes and up to 3 failures.
7 successes and up to 6 failures.
6 successes and up to 9 failures.
5 successes and up to 12 failures.
4 successes and up to 15 failures.

Infant mortality is far less a concern than mother mortality. A rate of 75% infant mortality would be sustainable if the mother is otherwise unaffected and remains healthy and fertile.

Since four is our target number, we won't bother beyond this. But this leaves the question of how many children survive to breeding age? The number of boys is not relevant for this because only one is needed to fertilize a tribe of females. (Gengis Khan, I'm looking at you!) So, we can use expendable boys to defend against lions and rival tribes, and only concern ourselves with the girls. If 25% of girls die childless, that then requires the survivors to have 5 children who survive to adulthood. If 50% die childless, it then requires each successful mother to have 8 children survive to adulthood.

So, if child mortality is less than 25%, and death in childbirth is less than 25%, the surviving mothers are required to produce six children each for the averages to work out to a growing society.

In other words, combined infant, child, and maternal mortality is a non-issue until around 40%. The culture would have to adapt to this reality, but humans are adaptable.

Note: this is a very simplistic analysis which ignores many factors. One could write a dissertation on the subject and barely scratch the surface. My assumptions are very broad and very imprecise. So, take it for what it is, and don't assume it serves any purpose but to broadly explore the OP's question.

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Your math is missing A) the chance a given mother will survive X attempts at childbirth (if it's 25% mother mortality per pregnancy, thats only an 18% chance that any one mother can birth 6 kids) and B) the probability that any given mother would take those odds in the first place.

Furthermore, the estimate of 4 surviving kids PER MOTHER (not per surviving mother) is an unbstantiated off-the-cuff estimate he makes regarding the perceived environmental threats during the human paleolithic and the coinciding estimated expansion in human population at that time.

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Originally Posted by Caesar

Your math is missing A) the chance a given mother will survive X attempts at childbirth (if it's 25% mother mortality per pregnancy, thats only an 18% chance that any one mother can birth 6 kids) and B) the probability that any given mother would take those odds in the first place.

Furthermore, the estimate of 4 surviving kids PER MOTHER (not per surviving mother) is an unbstantiated off-the-cuff estimate he makes regarding the perceived environmental threats during the human paleolithic and the coinciding estimated expansion in human population at that time.

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You are correct, sir. Which is why I specified that my post was food for thought rather than scientific analysis.

Also, the 25% mother mortality doesn't skew the odds as badly, considering she may have had three successes before the failure. It's horriffic to contemplate such a scenario, but the topic was survival, not mental health.

Anyway, the point is not that the numbers I presented reflect anything real, but that they identify the very minor role high infant mortality rates would play in the survival of a culture. The odds would have to exceed anything real world humans have ever experienced to make a dent in the growth rate of the race.

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Originally Posted by brian 333

You are correct, sir. Which is why I specified that my post was food for thought rather than scientific analysis.

Also, the 25% mother mortality doesn't skew the odds as badly, considering she may have had three successes before the failure. It's horriffic to contemplate such a scenario, but the topic was survival, not mental health.

Anyway, the point is not that the numbers I presented reflect anything real, but that they identify the very minor role high infant mortality rates would play in the survival of a culture. The odds would have to exceed anything real world humans have ever experienced to make a dent in the growth rate of the race.

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I would disagree with that analysis. Infant mortality, followed by early child mortality, are the two biggest factors in human mortality overall, with infant mortality being significantly greater. Infant mortality in 3rd world, rural environments hovers around 10% or more. This is in the modern world, where those people have access to more food and technology than they would have in a stone-age setting, but lets take it as such more or less. Now the human population took tens of thousands of years to break out, with an exponential growth of only about 0.5% per year for most of our early history (70,000 years!). So you can see, it doesn't take a lot of numbers much higher than this to flatline the human population, and this was in a world full of food and resources, where we are the apex species.

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Originally Posted by Caesar

I would disagree with that analysis. Infant mortality, followed by early child mortality, are the two biggest factors in human mortality overall, with infant mortality being significantly greater. Infant mortality in 3rd world, rural environments hovers around 10% or more. This is in the modern world, where those people have access to more food and technology than they would have in a stone-age setting, but lets take it as such more or less. Now the human population took tens of thousands of years to break out, with an exponential growth of only about 0.5% per year for most of our early history (70,000 years!). So you can see, it doesn't take a lot of numbers much higher than this to flatline the human population, and this was in a world full of food and resources, where we are the apex species.

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As I said, the concept I presented is not a scientific representation in any way.

But look at that 10% number, and consider that this is occurring in the exact same place that our population is growing fastest. The industrialized nations with access to good medical care also have easy access to contraception, and growth rates in China, Europe, and the US are virtually stagnant. But the human race is growing at an accelerating pace, on a global average, because of the mothers of the third world nations.

Infant mortality is not a real issue until it reaches rediculously high levels compared to historic norms. Maternity mortality is a more significant issue, but again, this is highest in the fastest growing populations.

So, if you would like to delve into the issue you are welcome to do so. For my purposes the scattershot illustration of the issue is sufficient to prove my point, which is that the potential for infant mortality to limit racial growth exists, but would require numbers not seen by the human race in the real world outside of specific historical periods of ecological disasters such as plagues, (and these were, so far, temporary setbacks.)

the numbers you mention, 15-50% actually match pretty well with the medieval infant mortality rates... So society would develop like that I think? which of course is to say "not a whole lot for like 7 centuries"

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Originally Posted by KatteLars

the numbers you mention, 15-50% actually match pretty well with the medieval infant mortality rates... So society would develop like that I think? which of course is to say "not a whole lot for like 7 centuries"

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Infant mortality isn't the same as mother mortality.

I think that, even at the low end, a 15% rate of maternal mortality per birth is probably too high for a society to sustain. The historical pre-modern rate is assumed to be around 1-1.5% (estimates are rough, given the poor quality of the data). So you're talking about a maternal death rate a full order of magnitude higher than known in actual humans. If you retain historically high levels of infant mortality with this - and you should, in fact infant mortality rates would almost certainly increase, since there would be fewer mothers available to care for young children.

If your society needs 4 children per woman to reach replacement rate in the population (due to infant mortality, disease, war, etc.), you're going to have some issues. First, if you need 4 children per adult woman, you actually need more than 4 per fertile adult woman because probably around 10% of your female population is infertile to begin with and cannot have any children.

So your child bearing pool goes like this:
Birth One: 0.9 X 0.85 = 0.765 - portion of the female population available for birth 2
Birth Two: 0.765 X 0.85 = 0.65 - available for birth 3
Birth Three: 0.65 X 0.85 = 0.55 - available for birth 4
Birth Four: 0.55 X 0.85 = 0.47 - available for birth 5
Birth Five: 0.47 X 0.85 = 0.40 - available for birth 6
Birth Six: 0.4 X 0.85 = 0.34 - available for further births

So, 6 births in with 15% your female population is down to 44% of the initial cohort size, and of the remainder nearly a third are the infertile woman who can't conceive and have avoided this whole process. Out of the fertile portion of the population nearly 2 in 3 will die just working to keep the population stable over time. That might be survivable, but it's frightfully brutal. Society would probably be forced to identify fertile woman shortly after puberty and enforce pregnancies upon them. Infertile women would acquire a massive amount of power in this society, because fertile women will be heavily controlled and most will die before they turn 30. Essentially, you're producing The Handmaid's Tale, only worse and without any possibility for improvement since if women don't go through this Russian Roulette game of childbirth the population collapses.

If you crank the mother mortality any further it gets impossible pretty fast. At 25% you're down to 50% after 2 births and 15% after 6. That's not enough to be sustainable, the population would die off.