If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Women’s back are specially designed - not to walk on catwalks or sit in the kitchen, - but to carry babies around for nine months. This is according to a recent report in Nature ^{1, 2}.

Look at a heavily pregnant woman. That awkward posture, the highly curved back, the lumbering gait. Not to mention the back aches. Be thankful for small blessings – it could be worse. A woman’s spine has evolved special features not found on a man’s spine – for the purpose of carrying a baby.

Anthropologists from Harvard and the University of Texas (Austin) ² described these features as follows:

• Three vertebrae create the curve of women’s lower back; only two spans that of men. Result: the extra vertebra distributes the stress of baby load over a wider area.
• The joints behind the spinal cord, called zygapophyseal joints, are relatively bigger in women than in men and are oriented at a slightly different angle. Result: the joints are able to resist stronger forces as well as brace themselves against slipping.

Without these special features, pregnant women cannot maintain their balance and the back can be badly damaged, even broken during pregnancy.

So next time a member of the male species tells you “you’re spineless”, he’d better think again. And next time you wish men can get pregnant for a change, you’d better think again.

There’s just no way around it. We can do it. They can’t.

[1] Ledford, H. NatureNews. How women bend over backwards for baby. 12 December 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.374

[2] Whitcome et al, Fetal load and the evolution of lumbar lordosis in bipedal hominins. Nature 450, 1075-1078 (13 December 2007) | doi:10.1038/nature06342

Tags: babies, Pregnancy, women's back