Human birth is far more challenging than that of other primates. In 1960, anthropologist Sherwood Washburn proposed a widely accepted explanation for the tight squeeze a baby experiences passing ...

Early human relatives experienced risky childbirth due to pelvic shape, revealing deep evolutionary roots of birth difficulty.

His innovations, including homelike delivery rooms and birthing pools, were based on his belief that “human birth cannot work as long as a woman is thinking.” By Adam Nossiter Michel Odent, a French ...

Medical intervention in human birth is now so widespread in industrialized countries that deliveries are seldom spontaneous. Yet with no intervention there is clear persistence of a general mammalian ...