04/03/2026
💠“Some women were just made for birth.”
It sounds harmless … but that idea has a long, damaging history.
Victorian doctors claimed rural working women had “easier” births than delicate upper-class women. This was a belief rooted in class, gender, and power, not biology.
That story stretches back thousands of years, to Exodus, where Hebrew women were said to “birth faster” than Egyptians.
These myths have lingered, shaping how we see pain, resilience, and race in birth today.
Black and brown women in the UK are still four times more likely to die in childbirth — a legacy of those same assumptions.
Understanding where these ideas come from helps us see why modern birth looks the way it does.
Save this if it made you think differently about birth and explore more history that still shapes pregnancy, birth, and motherhood with .
