Women and Childbirth

Childbirth was essentially, especially in the medieval ages very much an all female affair. Midwives usually oversaw the birth of children with male doctors and surgeons only being called if there was an immediate danger of death for the mother or child. It was not until the seventeenth century, mostly in France, that men began to be involved in midwifery.(Wiesner-Hanks, 85). Though they did not have the same knowledge that female midwives could gain from experience and other midwives, they did have access to classes and could participate in dissections to gain more knowledge, something that women could not do. Although it was  considered by many to be very improper for men to be involved in the childbirth experience, the male midwives became more common in England and France, especially among the middle-to-upper class women who could afford them.  

Midwives were responsible for not only the physical welfare of the mother and child, but were considered largely responsible for the spiritual as well,  in many areas of Europe they were allowed to preform emergency baptisms, a rite generally only allowed to be done by priests (Wiesner-Hanks, 90).  Childbirth, in general, involved a lot of spiritual ideas. One of the most interesting ones was the idea of "churching", the idea that a woman must be purified after giving birth, an idea rejected by Protestants but in some churches continues to this day. It is said that the idea is originally connected to Jewish rituals of purification after childbirth, and also to when Mary took Jesus to be presented at the temple. The painting below is The Presentation in the Temple by Hans Memling, circa 1470/80, a depiction of where the idea is supposedly from. 

http://www.hansmemling.org/The-Presentation-in-the-Temple-1463.html