Caesarian births directly affecting human evolution

[The Grand Nudger]

The law of unintended consequences.  

My wife and I got lucky with our first together, in that she nearly died and our daughter only lost the use of her right arm at birth.  The fates decreed that she and I should have never had children together.  It would've been a shame, if that held, because we have a wonderful clutch of brothers and sisters whose parents love them and who love each other very, very much.   Frankly, we couldn't have survived the creeping disappointment of a childless marriage.  It was the singular and overriding drive to have a family that bound us first and most tightly.  

We both blamed ourselves,  in the long drives to Cinci for specialists, and worse.  Hours and hours of pregnant silence between us.  Caring for an infant with a non functional limb is exhausting.   She never learned to crawl, for example (how could she....).  If she rolled over onto her right side there was a distinct possibility that she would suffocate.  When she began to stand and waddle, if she fell...she couldn't catch herself, and kids are head-heavy.  She was meant to be the core of our happiness together, we were supposed to be made better by her presence as the best between us.  The reality of the matter was entirely different.  Sleepless nights, the economic burden of disability, silently building resentments and self loathing.  We were both, in retrospect, deeply depressed and trying to deal with it apart from each other....which doesn't exactly make a relationship stronger.  I was sleeping in a chair, my wife flirted with the idea of divorce, lol.


It was only when Lahni started to move her arm, against all expectation, that the seal on all of this private turmoil was broken.  I hear the wife scream from the other room, genuinely crying out to heaven.  My mind defaulted to the worst case scenario.  Our daughter had rolled over in her sleep, or fell down face first, or had caught her arm in something and unfeelingly broken it.  My wife was on her knees, holding one hand in the other so tightly her knuckles were white, praying.    We spent that night in bed together, all of us.  Happy, together, for the first time in a long time.

All of our other children were c-sections, without hesitation.  Sure, that's not "how it's meant to happen"...it completely evades any selective pressure and so allows "bad genes" through the first pass filter, birth.  That's the point.  The less sterile term for "selective pressure" in context is infant mortality rate (and related mortality rates in childbirth for the mother).   A c-section would have had the effect of avoiding both the lasting physical harm to our daughter and the temporary rift between us....and like I said above, we're the lucky ones......the ones where the mother only -nearly- died, and the child was only partially paralyzed, and whose relationships survived it.