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Birth

From Oathbond Wiki

Childbirth is safe by any standard the older world would recognize. A physician or a midwife attends, both are trained, the room is clean, and the surgeon's answer exists if it is needed. Women still die, and it is rare enough to shock a whole street when it happens.

How many children a household has is decided rather than endured. Nyvra is cheap and reliable and every free woman chooses whether to take it, and almost all do; Wynyvra is not cheap and is bought deliberately, by two people who agreed. So most city households have two or three children, spaced as the parents intended, and a farm household has more because a farm needs hands. A large family is somebody's decision and is read as one.

A woman is laid up for weeks rather than months, with a sister, a mother, or a hired woman in to hold the household together; in a house with slaves the household does not miss a step.

Her periods are an ordinary matter with ordinary answers. An apothecary or a dry-goods shop sells pads of pressed wadding used once and thrown away — the same trade that makes the world's surgical dressings — and rolled ones with a cord; a working household uses washed cloth and buys the other kind when it can. The apothecary also sells something for the cramping that works, and many women take Nyvra in the formulations that lighten the bleeding or stop it, and think no more about the question.

See also