After I wrote that, part of me wonders if it would help for women to give birth while on all fours, rather than while on their backs. It seems to me that this might make the pelvis less “in the way,” and be more similar to the way other animals do it. On the other hand, if labor is long, it could be tiring to be on all fours for a while.
It is curious why we would not have evolved so that childbirth would not be so dangerous without modern medicine. Surely women would be more likely to reproduce a second time if they don’t die the first time around, so there would be a reproductive advantage. Evolution doesn’t work with things that don’t directly contribute to reproduction, but it would seem that these kinds of modifcations would improve the chance of the mother reproducing more, as well as the offspring being able to reach reproductive age on their own.
It may simply be that enough women survived childbirth and bipedalism happened recently enough that the evolutionary push wasn’t strong enough to evolve in time.
On other topics, I’ve seen arguments that menopause allows human females to evolve into the role of grandmother without continuously reproducing. The anthropological argument is that the presence of grandparents, and particularly grandmothers, makes the family more likely to survive. I am not in a position to evaluate that argument, but I thought it was intriguing.
