Secretly, women (especially those born in towns) loathe childbirth. Their reasons are diverse. Some say they don’t want to look old. Others cite lack of the motherly instinct. Some fear losing their men because of some important body part that might be too big afterwards. And if you are the kind who blame men for every problem on Earth you will probably say labour pain is not worth going through for a man.
I am more interested in the first ‘excuse.’ “Nani? Mimi sitaki mimba. Ndio nizeeke haraka! Mimi bado ni manyanga (who, me? I am not getting pregnant! I am not ready to be a hag, can’t you see I am still a hot mama)?!” They will explain. And yes, the women are right. It is true that the more children a woman delivers, the more she looks aged.
“More children mean that a woman’s body experiences more stress: during the months of carrying the baby and even during lactation. It also means more work raising these children. This takes a toll on her and she will look older than her peers,” Dr Esther Wanjohi, a specialist on women’s health at Nairobi Hospital says.
A study published in the journal PLOS One now has linked the meta-physiology of childbirth and aging in women. Pregnancy causes increased energy metabolism due to foetal development, milk production and energy expenditure associated with taking care of a child. This in turn leads to higher oxidative stress in body tissues.
Describing the phenomenon in layman’s terms, Dr Richard Bribiescas of Yale University, the lead study author, told reporters that pregnancy can be interpreted as a trade-off “between reproduction and maternal survival.”
Essentially, the metabolic costs of pregnancy and lactation have a heavy physiological effect on women.
In places where energy resources are limited, like rural villages, effects of the trade-off are much more pronounced, concluding that childbearing can hasten aging in women. Dr Wanjohi reserves her opinion (because at this point no concrete studies are available on the subject) on the number of children the average woman should aim for.
According to her, organs like bones have a lifespan. Therefore, the more they are used and put under stress, the faster they degenerate. This in turn creates symptoms of ‘ageing’ when someone could be much younger.
And does looking old have a bearing on when one is likely to die? “Of course it does,” Dr Wanjohi says. “But you should know that the oldest person on Earth is not always the first one to die. There are far too many factors to take this one observation as absolute.” In the Yale study, researchers tested 100 healthy postmenopausal women from five rural villages in Poland.
They found that women with more pregnancies, more births and more time lactation, had higher levels of a biomarker for accelerated aging.
“This study, for the first time, provides compelling evidence on childbirth and aging,” Richard notes.