Does any
mammal have
an easy birth?

The full narration of the video.

Is there an animal for which giving birth is easy? Yes. A kangaroo is pregnant for only about a month, and her newborn is the size of a jelly bean, about one gram. Now look at us. Nine months of pregnancy, a baby of over three kilos, and on the way out, its head barely fits through the mother's pelvis.

In 2023, about 260,000 women worldwide died from pregnancy and childbirth. China does much better: in 2024, about fourteen per hundred thousand. Both are mammals, so why such a gap? Think of growing a baby as buying something very expensive.

Humans pay all at once: the baby grows big and complete inside before it's born. So the bill comes due on the day of birth. Kangaroos pay in installments: a small down payment, a tiny pink bean of a baby. Its eyes are sealed shut and its back legs barely exist, but its two little front paws are already strong.

It climbs up through the fur on its mother's belly all by itself. In about three minutes it's in the pouch, latched on to a teat. With a baby that small, the way out isn't tight at all. The birth itself is easy on mother and baby. The rest is paid slowly, in the pouch: the joey lives there for about eight months, and nurses until it's one.

The hard work doesn't vanish. It just moves to the year after. So are humans the unluckiest at giving birth? Not necessarily. A researcher at the University of Vienna went through 170 studies. Cows, sheep, deer, seals: difficult births are common.

In some species, they happen as often as in people without hospitals, or even more. Spotted hyenas have it worse. Their cubs must squeeze out through a long, narrow passage. Scientists who study them estimate that most firstborn cubs don't survive.

There's also the opposite case. Baby Japanese macaques have heads that fit just as tightly as ours. Yet in a monkey park in Austria, 281 babies were born over 27 years, and not one mother died giving birth. No one knows yet why it goes so smoothly, and this is the record of just one group of monkeys.

Put all this together, and a pattern appears: the bigger and more developed the newborn, the harder the birth. Some researchers think bigger newborns survive better, so generation after generation they grow bigger, right up to the line where they almost get stuck. To give birth easily, you'd have to be a kangaroo: deliver a jelly bean, and save the hard part for a year of nursing.

How much did your baby weigh at birth?