Seems to me that even with our advances we suffer from an excessive amount of complications for a natural act.
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To be fair, animals that have difficulty birthing tend to not live or produce viable offspring, which kinda cuts down on animals having historically difficult births.
Hi, vet tech here. Therianology and animal parturition is kinda my bag.
I’m not going to say animals do not experience difficulties in the birthing process. Far from it. “Dystocia,” or, difficulties that interfere with the birth process, are common to see in the veterinary field. In horses and cows it can be startlingly common to have a calf or foal get stuck, come out the wrong way, or half a dozen other things that can result in the death of the neonates and/or the dam. Sheep and goats, too. The term “water baby” is never good. But most of my expertise is with cats and dogs, so let me use them as more concrete examples.
Lots of folks here have pointed out how our giant heads make birthing difficult. I’m here to tell you, it makes it damn near *impossible* for some dog breeds. The English Bulldog, for example, is almost always delivered via c-section. The way we have bred these creatures has created a stupidly mismatched ratio of head to pelvis, and – leaving aside that their anatomy is so malformed that half the time they can’t even physically copulate – they honestly should not exist. Nature doesn’t really allow for things that inhibit reproduction. Being unable to pass a neonate through the birth canal is a big one.
Much of that is our fault. Like selectively breeding ourselves for smarter mates and bigger brains that make our heads rather uncooperative to the whole “birthing” thing, we have selectively bred dogs to a point where their bodies would not otherwise survive without intervention. (I could go on a rant here about brachycephalism, elongated soft pallettes, stenosis nares, and more… but that’s not the question you asked.) We have done this most extensively with dogs and some horse breeds, which is why we see it so frequently in them. You don’t see it nearly as often in, say, cats.
Rare is the cat who has dystocia. At least your run-of-the-mill, heaven-knows-what breed created from this gangled ratter in the barn. Cats haven’t been quite so particularly bred. Granted, we’ve still selectively bred cats in some breeds so’s to give them every last disadvantage we have to dogs (in the name of “cute”), like the Persian, but those are much fewer and further between than your common mackerel tabby from the dumpster. These cats come from a long line of “can you really consider this animal ‘domesticated'” stock that in two generations can go from lap cat to feral. You don’t survive in the wild to pass on your genes if you suck at producing offspring. Rare is the cat who has dystocia; rarer still is the Persian who can cut it as a feral.
Where am I going with all this? Well, you kinda answered your own question: humans do, in fact, tend to have more difficulty birthing than most animals… and that’s because a lot of our ancestors only survived the birthing process with medical intervention. Animals don’t generally get that luxury of midwifery, physican assistance, or post-partum medical attention like humans do. And, if the birth goes badly, they don’t usually get the chance to repeat that attempt. Nature is cruel, but she is also precise: only those who can survive reproduction get to keep doing it, and produce more of the same.
Humans just… well. We tend to give Nature the finger.
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