Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You (6 page)

A similar self-sacrifice for sex happens to a lot of male spiders, but they don’t die from stress. They’re killed and eaten by females during sex. It’s called female cannibalism, and it happens in many different kinds of spiders. A female spider is almost always a much larger predator than a male, making him pretty much exactly the kind of animal she’d like to eat.
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To have sex with her, a male has to put himself within striking distance—he has no choice about that. So males of some spider species bring food along as a “nuptial gift” when they want to mate. In those cases, the bigger the gift, the longer he gets to mate before she eats him, and the more of her eggs will be his.
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That’s a great system for a male when it’s available, but most spider species don’t exchange those gifts, leaving many male spiders out there no other option than to roll the dice and just hope the female isn’t hungry.

One species of spider with female cannibalism is an orb-weaving spider called
Nephilengys
, but males of that species have evolved a survival strategy different from gift giving. Instead, they rip off their own penises mid-mating.

Well, truth be told, it’s not really a penis. It’s called a palp. And it’s not just one palp; he has two of them. And they’re on the sides of his head. Anyway, like any male spider, he mates with a female by inserting his palps into holes in her abdomen and pumping sperm into her. But partway through the mating process, the male
Nephilengys
spider pulls a quick one on her: he rips off his palps, leaves them sticking into her abdomen, and makes a break for it. He doesn’t always escape—male survival rates are only about 25 percent—but even if she catches and eats him, his palps will keep on pumping sperm into her while she’s distracted by the meal. It’s not the cleanest strategy in the world, but it works.

If, by some great stroke of luck, the male does manage to escape, things get even more interesting. Now castrated, he waits just beyond the female’s reach for any oncoming males with thoughts of romance. Should a male approach, the castrated male fights the intact intruder as aggressively as he can. Since he’ll never be able to reproduce again, his DNA’s only hope of being passed on lies with the female he just escaped. For his DNA’s sake, the best strategy now is to prevent any other males from mating with her. That way the eggs she lays will carry his DNA, not someone else’s.

It didn’t take long for researchers looking at these spiders to notice that when fights happened between a castrated male and an intact male, the injured spider almost always won. This made them wonder whether there is something about having his genitals
cut off that gives a spider a boost. So they did experiments chasing spiders around a table with paintbrushes until the spiders collapsed from exhaustion. Surprisingly, the researchers found that castrated males had 80 percent higher endurance than intact males. It seems that spiders with their palps intact have the instinct to give up early, since perhaps another female might be available elsewhere. The castrated male doesn’t have other options, so he fights with everything he’s got.
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Human males have their lives cut short by sex too. Most don’t die from the stress of mating itself, and most aren’t killed and eaten by their female sex partners, but they still pay a price. Specifically, it turns out that for humans, just having male sex hormones in the body shortens life expectancy. Evidence of this effect comes from some fascinating data on castrated men from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Korea.
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Back then, powerful men with harems would sometimes adopt eunuchs to work as guards or laborers. These men, who were castrated before puberty, were convenient employees to the emperors since they could do the manual labor but wouldn’t try to have sex with women in the house. The eunuchs were perfectly healthy, but they had no testicles, and since testicles are the part of the body that produces testosterone, the eunuchs lived their otherwise normal lives without that hormone in their bodies.

Here’s the evidence that human men live shorter lives than they would without sex: when you compare eunuchs to intact males of similar socioeconomic status in that same society, the eunuchs lived fifteen to nineteen years longer on average, typically into their seventies. Laborers with their testicles in place were living into their late fifties, whereas one of the eunuchs lived
to be 109! This difference, coupled with the fact that females usually live longer than males anyway, strongly suggests that human males have their lifespans cut short by testosterone. Since you can’t make sperm without testosterone, you could say that human males have their lives cut short by sex.

And as bad as it is for human males, they’ve got nothing on females of the species. Females can’t pass on their DNA without going through pregnancy and childbirth, and although human childbirth is a beautiful and life-changing event, it’s as dangerous as hell.

In North America, the odds that a fifteen-year-old girl will go on to die from a maternal cause (pregnancy, childbirth, or a failed abortion) is just one in 3,800, but those fantastic odds are due largely to the availability of modern medicine.
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I’m talking about the basics, things like blood pressure monitoring before birth, sterile procedures during birth to avoid infections, antibiotics if infections do occur, and basic drugs to speed up clotting in case a mother bleeds too heavily after the baby’s born. Those simple things improve a woman’s odds of survival a great deal compared to what they are without medicine. As evidence, you can just look at places where those tools aren’t available. The odds of a fifteen-year-old girl in sub-Saharan Africa dying from a pregnancy, childbirth, or a failed abortion at some point in her life is 1 in 150. At first, those better-than-99-percent odds might seem decent, but they’re twenty-five times worse than the North American odds, and when you’re talking about millions of women, those maternal deaths add up very quickly.
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Take a moment to think about where you were twenty-four hours ago. Really do this. Stop reading, look at a clock, and figure it out. Think about exactly where you were and what you were doing.

Got it?

Since that moment, roughly eight hundred women have died painful and tragic deaths from pregnancy, childbirth, or a failed abortion, and more than 95 percent of those deaths would have been prevented by access to basic modern medicine. That happens every day, and those numbers are a concrete reminder that there’s no Mother Nature looking after us.
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We’re animals, and as with other animals, our bodies reflect a trade-off between survival and reproduction. Big-brained humans can compete better than small-brained ones, so the size of the average human baby’s head has reached the very limit of what a mother can handle. If you imagine what childbirth must have been like even just a few generations ago, before painkillers, before antibiotics, nature starts to look pretty rough. Here in the developed world, that can be easy to forget sometimes.

When my wife, Shelby, and I found out that she was pregnant with Sam, we didn’t even think about the possibility that she might die; we didn’t really have to. If we’d bothered to look it up, we’d have learned that her odds of death were around one-eightieth
of a percent. With those odds, we had the luxury to take control of the whole experience. We got to choose from among several options for the childbirth: Shelby could give birth at home or we could go to a hospital; we could have the baby delivered by a midwife or by a doctor; Shelby could use no painkillers at all or have the lower half of her body completely frozen by an epidural. No matter what our decisions, we knew that she and the baby would almost certainly both survive.

Those decisions, and others like them, were usually presented along a continuum between a “natural childbirth” and a “medicalized childbirth.” Here’s where I want to start challenging your assumptions about sex and nature. Take a moment to think about what defines a “natural” birth. Is it where the baby is born that matters? Is it whether or not drugs are used? Is it who delivers the baby that matters? What makes one childbirth more natural than another?

As Shelby and I got closer and closer to the due date, everyone kept telling us that we could make whatever decisions we wanted, but there was a definite pressure, especially from our friends, to choose the “natural” course wherever possible. People kept saying completely meaningless things like “Women have been having babies for centuries.” (How does that help at all? They’ve been dying in childbirth too!) Worse, several people tried to calm us by saying things like “Nothing should go wrong just so long as Shelby relaxes, gets in touch with her body, and lets things take their natural course.” Or “This is what her body was made for.”

That is where my issue lies with the entire concept of a natural childbirth.

If you say, “Things go well when a mother is in touch with her natural self,” you’ve implied that when things go wrong, it might
be the woman’s fault for failing to do so. It’s sad enough that more than a quarter of a million women die from maternal causes each year,
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but to blame even a fraction of them for their own deaths, because they somehow failed to be “natural” enough, is perverse.

In addition, that hijacking of the word
natural
puts a woman who does have access to modern technologies in a very difficult position. It erodes her ability to choose what she wants by making certain options at childbirth seem at odds with other decisions in her life. For example, if a woman chooses to eat organic foods, or if she enjoys spending time outside, she may feel pressure to make decisions about childbirth that are also labeled “natural.” Of course, how a baby comes out of you has nothing to do with what you eat or how you exercise, but when things are presented that way, a person can be pushed into a decision that ultimately may not be the best one for them.

Take epidurals, for example. To say that a woman should be able to handle the pain of childbirth without an epidural because she’s in touch with her natural body seems crazy to me. Giving birth is undoubtedly one of the toughest experiences a human being could ever have, so why should a woman be labeled “unnatural” if she uses modern medicine to help her through? I’m not saying all women should have epidurals. I’m just saying choosing an epidural shouldn’t be seen as some kind of unwomanly act. Labeling an epidural-free childbirth as more “natural” than one with painkillers just isn’t fair. Humans use drugs all the time, for all kinds of reasons, and humans have been using narcotics for centuries. Why is childbirth the only time drugs are suddenly so taboo? My hunch is that it’s because women have epidurals and
men don’t. If I have a headache, I take Tylenol, and nobody’s ever called me unnatural for that. Why should a woman facing childbirth suddenly be forced to tough it out?

Then there’s the whole decision about where to have a baby. Many people consider home births more natural than births in hospitals. That drives me nuts. Try to name one context in which the men who go to the hospital for a treatment are labeled unnatural. Creating an arbitrary and unjustified set of standards for women, on what might be the hardest day of their life, with no corresponding set of rules for men, is ludicrous. If it’s so unnatural for a woman to go to a hospital, should we discourage women from working as doctors too?

Let me be clear: I’m not advocating for any particular choices—hospital or home, drug-free or epidural, midwife or doctor, C-section or vaginal, squatting on the floor or lying on your back. I don’t even care if you want to eat the placenta afterward. Those are all perfectly valid options. I’m just saying let’s take the false label of “natural” out of the equation so that women can be free to choose whatever experience they want.

The reason different people have different definitions of a “natural childbirth” is that it’s an imaginary concept. Neither a hospital room nor a modern living room will replicate the places our ancestors delivered babies seven hundred years ago, and nothing from that era would match the experience our ancestors had a million years ago. While it might be helpful to think about the kinds of procedures women have used in the past, it’s not fair to say a woman alive today can only be natural by trying to replicate what some women did long ago. And if they should do so, which women? In what culture? At what time?

As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter if a woman gives
birth on the international space station or if she gives birth squatting in the woods with her mother-in-law banging pots nearby to keep the bears away. If a baby comes out, it’s a childbirth. Let’s leave the word
natural
out of it.

Childbirth is tough for women, but there are animals out there that have it even worse than humans do. That’s why I relish the moments when people say things about childbirth like “You should take inspiration from a pregnant cat or dog and the way they naturally know what to do, and just let nature take its course.” People wouldn’t say those kinds of things if they had pet hyenas, and it’s fun to see the looks on their faces when I tell them why.

Hyenas are weird. They look like dogs, but they’re not dogs at all. In fact, they’re more closely related to cats than to dogs.
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The female spotted hyena is especially weird, because she has a great big, hollow, tubular clitoris that really for all intents and purposes looks exactly like the penis of a male. It can even swell up and get erect just like a penis. The labia, which are the liplike structures on either side of a human’s vaginal opening, have fused together in spotted hyenas and almost look like a scrotum. And as with a penis, the only opening of a female hyena’s reproductive tract is at the very tip of that clitoris. They pee through it, have sex through it, and give birth through it. Even for biologists who work with spotted hyenas every day, it can be very difficult to tell a male from a female.

When a male sticks his penis into a female’s clitoris during sex, her muscles pull the tip of the clitoris open, and then the
whole thing folds outside in, kind of like the inverted sleeve of a shirt.
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It’s weird, but it works. Spotted hyenas mate and get pregnant without any major issues, but when the time comes for giving birth, that huge clitoris becomes a huge problem. The baby can’t fit out the hole at the tip, and worse, the umbilical cord can’t reach all the way from the placenta to the tip of the clitoris. The only way for the baby to come out alive is for the clitoris to tear open. That tearing happens the first time a mother gives birth. In captivity, 10 to 20 percent of females die while giving birth to their first litter. In the wild, survival rates appear to be much higher, but the clitoris tearing still happens. After that first birth, the torn clitoris heals, and the scar that’s left behind seems to make subsequent births easier.
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