Poet and scientist Cat Bohannon wants you to try this thought experiment: Picture an alternate opening of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The original begins with the iconic (and much parodied) scene in which a band of ape-like early humans beats a rival tribe into submission. After their victory, one of them triumphantly tosses his bludgeon, a masculine, violent tool, which morphs into a spaceship. But in the new version, the scene opens on a pregnant female waddling off to give birth with the assistance of another, older female. After the birth, this proto-midwife raises the newborn overhead, triumphant, and the scene melts into one of a woman holding a baby on a spaceship.
Humanity managed to survive and conquer the world, Bohannon argues in “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution," not because of bludgeons but because of something else: gynecology. Giving birth as a human is incredibly dangerous, and in Bohannon’s view, practices that helped us survive that process, such as reproductive choice and midwifery, should be venerated as drivers of civilization.
