Troubling Childbirth in Ancient Greece

This Ancient Greek statuette, a votive offering showing a pregnant women wearing a supportive binder, speaks to the palpable fears and worries that pregnant women from this part of history all faced. The figurine’s mouth seems to be contorted in pain, perhaps due to her labor. In the Ancient Greek world, when a woman became pregnant, her life was actually endangered — maternal mortality was that high.

The Orphic Hymn to Prothyraia (2nd or 3rd c CE) states this clearly. The poem is dedicated to Eileithyia, Goddess of childbirth, and invokes her protection: “o Eileithyia, you free from pain those in terrible distress. Upon you alone pregnant women call, O comforter of souls, and in you alone there is relief from pains of labor.”

Bio-archaeology demonstrates that gestating women in Bronze-Age Mycenaean Greece (1700-1100 BCE) had a particularly grim situation. Their bones tell of severe malnutrition — women regularly were getting less meat and food, leading to early anemia, horrible tooth decay, and vulnerability to parasites that were much worse than men’s situations. All of this contributed to bodies that were much less able to handle the stress and strains of childbirth in an age of pre-modern medicine. Crete burials show women at highest mortality between ages 20-25 (10 years younger than their male counterparts), just the main ages of childbearing.

One of the saddest markers of the disregard for young girls in Bronze-Age Greece was a high prevalence of flattened pelvises. This condition develops when girls are malnourished, and leads to enormous challenges later in life when trying to birth children.

No wonder the character Medea claims in Euripides’ play by the same name “I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once.”