A few days ago I talked about Euskadi for being the autonomous community with a lower rate of caesarean sections and I told you about your women imagining them large, strong and capable of giving birth almost without disheveled. Well, I was wrong, and I should have said the opposite, that they will be rather short women, and that a recent study has shown that shorter women have a pelvis with a different shape, which makes it easier for them to give birth.
And stature is not the only characteristic that can alter the future of a birth because, apparently, Mothers who have a bigger head have the same fate, as if their bodies took into account that of mother with big head, son with big head, and thus create a somewhat different pelvis to be able to give birth to that theoretical big-headed son.
The difficult human birth
Humans are very intelligent and dominate the world. So far everything is right (well, some of us are not so intelligent and we are destroying it, but this is another issue). Now, there is something that we do not think about, and it is in the way of giving birth, and there are other animals that do it better than us. This is because The baby's head is very large for the woman's pelvis and, consequently, childbirth is not usually an easy task (compared to how it would be if the pelvis were larger).
This difference became evident when our ancestors stopped going on all fours and began to walk in standing position. We became smarter, our brains developed more and more, head size increased and, at the same time, the hip narrowed. Knowing this, current researchers ask: Are there women who can give birth better than others? And although the most logical answer seems to be a "no", or a "biggest and strongest", the real answer seems to be another, as we have already said.
The shape of the pelvis is different among women
Women who have the big head, and as a result, babies with a large head will surely be pregnant, they have a birth canal adapted to that situation. In them, the shape of the pelvis is more round and the coccyx is shorter than in other women and this causes more free space for the baby to leave.
In contrast, women who have the smallest head have a pelvic cavity with a more oval shape, as if they did not require that adaptation because their children, presumably, will not have a large head. This form, however, can make labor more difficult.
The shorter women, those that one can see pregnant and ask "How will you give birth if you just told me that your baby weighs more than 3 kilos?" they have a pelvis with a round entrance, which, as we have said, favors childbirth, while taller people have the entrance of the most oval pelvis.
As a curiosity, men also suffer those variations. We are not going to give birth to anyone, but those with the largest head and / or are short have a pelvis with a round entrance and those with the smallest head and / or are taller, oval shaped.
A matter of evolution?
Researchers have explained that the difference is most likely due to a matter of evolution, of natural selection. If thousands of years ago the short women had the round pelvis, and others oval, and the first ones had easier to have children it is easier for us to be descendants of these and not those who being short and with the oval pelvis were at greater risk during the births Similarly, when the babies came with the big head, those whose mothers had the shortest coccyx and the round shape survived and not so much those whose mothers had a less prepared pelvis.
The most adapted to give birth were surviving while the less adapted did not (or the first had more children and the second less), and that difference has reached to this day. Perhaps this can finally explain how it is possible that rather short women have given birth to children up to 4 kilos.
What do you think about it? Do you see relationship between stature and births?
