While I agree with Blitzkreig that a lot of these things actually come from excess (imagine an obese woman giving birth - how is this going to be pleasant for her?) and on the nature of digestion, I do have to point out that many people in the West have
strong deficiencies in Vitamin A (particularly the animal-derived form),
magnesium (as HPS Pythia and Shannon pointed out before, this rules over tens of thousands of processes in the human body), folate (folate deficiency causes many fetal malformations every year), selenium, copper...
One of the worst deficiencies that the medical industry flat out refuses to acknowledge is in
Vitamin K2 MK4, the form of Vitamin K that passes reasonably well through the placenta, hence why American babies have to be injected at birth with Vitamin K in the form of phylloquinone or menaquinone due to the ridiculous amount of blood clots in newborns (due to industrial farming, no grass and sunlight, butter and ghee by and large no longer has Vitamin K2 MK4, nor does poultry legs or fat). MK4 is the primary form of Vitamin K stored in the brain and it has many applications with heart health, teeth health and so on, it also stimulates glutathione, the most major antioxidant in the brain and nerves. All of this is known in medical journals yet doctors bury their head in the sand and demand more injections because 'its easier'.
Furthermore, subsections of the western population suffer from malnourishment with the B Vitamins (including riboflavin which governs many processes of the body, though this deficiency is far more common in the third world), zinc and in many other minerals.
Vitamin D is ludicrously low among vegans to the point
where vegan kids have revived the condition of rickets, but even normal people struggle with this.
Eating muscle meats (like steak) and ground beef made of various crap, along with processed meats that often strip the nutritional content out, doesn't come close to satisfying certain nutritional needs, especially in pregnancy. Humans
NEED to eat offal, particularly liver. This has gone out of fashion due to people being puerile about the taste, weirded out by guts and snobbish about 'peasant foods', but there is no real substitute.
I know some people love salads but only munching on certain leaves like kale all day doesn't really help either, especially for women. Vegetables are not all cut of the same cloth, vegetables have distinct properties with each variety and certain vegetables are not all that bioavailable, even if they happen to be fashionable and light on the stomach. The Greeks viewed things like lettuce in specific contexts.
Sugar has damaged many people's dental health beyond repair and can also destroy one's mood on a regular basis. The amount of honey (an animal-made carb that is excellent for human health) in the human diet has reduced dramatically lately, compared to endless amounts of shit and hyper processed carbs. There is also a lot of fake honey going around.
On top of long-term hormonal problems caused by industrial chemicals in plastics proven to assault human and animal (pet) fertility like DEHP, it isn't really a shock that some people are walking around hideously depressed and don't even want to exercise. Pregnant women also suffer with the cocktail of all this.
I do not think eating a cow is going to remove the pain of childbirth but eating liver occasionally, K2 MK4 products, maintaining healthy magnesium levels and things like this may reduce the prevalence of postpartum bleeding, postpartum depression, babies with blood clotting (which no doubt affects the mother) and other problems.
