ABSTRACT
A mother might be terrified of the pain of childbirth, while being quite confident that she would survive the experience. Those mothers belonging to the Church of England were reminded officially that childbirth was dangerous. So far as can be ascertained, early modern women—who controlled the management of childbirth – preferred the mother's right to life over that of the child; and it was probably realized that the Caesarean operation on the living mother was likely to be fatal. Some seventeenth-century mothers, on the eve of childbirth, gave explicit instructions to their husbands on how to take care of their surviving children should the birth prove fatal. Three examples have been cited in the literature: Elizabeth Josceline, whose advice was actually published in 1622 as The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Child, Anne Halkett, who around 1666 wrote a Mother's Instructions', and Anne Bradstreet, who wrote a poem 'Before the birth of one of her children'.
