It was also to make sure the kid was alive, so if the child was stillborn, the mother couldn't slip in someone else's living child. First time this wasn't done in England was with James II's son, and thus everybody thought he wasn't really James and his wife's boy.
I actually would be. I know at least in the Middle East, there were major cultural prohibitions against any male other than family seeing a woman in a state of undress no matter what she was doing (assisting doctors were sometimes blinded after helping with the births of royal women, part of the reason for midwifery in the Middle East) and in the Far East, multiple wives made it so that the birth of any one child was unimportant. Each of many could become the heir at his father's say so.
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branchandroot
Re: AU of Sun Child: Zhao's Child is Born
Date: 2010-10-18 02:44 pm (UTC)I actually would be. I know at least in the Middle East, there were major cultural prohibitions against any male other than family seeing a woman in a state of undress no matter what she was doing (assisting doctors were sometimes blinded after helping with the births of royal women, part of the reason for midwifery in the Middle East) and in the Far East, multiple wives made it so that the birth of any one child was unimportant. Each of many could become the heir at his father's say so.