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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5785404" data-attributes="member: 22424">Oddly enough, I actually have an answer for that, just in case I was asked...In "Bastion of Broken Souls", there's a discussion of an agreement amongst the gods that the souls of the unborn are not to be tampered with. That's kind of a key point in the adventure - something has gone wrong, the gods are banned from helping (or even talking about it), so it's up to the PCs to sort it out.So, I extrapolated from that: divine magic is barred from affecting pregnant women or very young children, starting about a week before she gives birth until about a week afterwards. During that time, you're on your own. And so, there are no magical midwives or the like. Sure, the society could set up nice, clean hospitals to prevent death in childbirth... but then, we could have done that anyway, but didn't.(This actually ties in somewhat with medieval Christianity. They believed that the soul didn't actually enter the body until after brith, and that infant mortality was due to the child not receiving a soul. It's not a great leap from something like that to "divine magic can't help you".)Of course, there's an even easier alternate explanation: the major danger to women and children in medieval times seems to have been infection caused by unsanitary conditions. IOW, disease. Curing disease is a non-trivial spell - it's just not something that any old adept can do. Given the standard demographics as laid out in the 3e DMG, clerics and adepts are rare enough that very few women could get access to the necessary spell. Sure, some few women and children would be saved, but relatively few in terms of the population as a whole.</blockquote>

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