cco:Birth and Macbeth

[michaelrabenberg]

Here's the CCO definition of Birth:

Birth. A Natural Process of bringing forth offspring.

This would seem not to include, for example, processes of being delivered via C-section. But although the three witches in Macbeth evidently endorsed the view that people on whom C-sections are performed were never born, I find that view pretty silly.

I guess some might not share my intuitions; some might side with the witches on the nature of birth. (Please note that the view opposite to mine is literally demonic.) Or some might just ask who cares.

One reason it'd be nice to say that people on whom C-sections are performed participate in a Birth is that, for all people who are out and about, you can capture their birthdate and place-of-birth information by reference to a Birth process in which they participated (by saying when the event ended and where it occurred). By contrast if you say that Macduff didn't participate in a Birth but other people did, then you can't do such a unified representation across all out-and-about people.

Another way to go, if you side with the witches, would be to introduce some more general term that encompasses both non-C-section-etc. cases and C-section-etc. cases. I'd have to think more to think of a good catchall term. But as I indicated above I don't think that's necessary; I think Macduff was born and the play is a joke.

(Maybe other imaginable situations, involving e.g. ectogestation, really would require a new more general term. Matter for another day.)

At any rate, I suggest that the following is an improvement on the status quo:

Birth. A Process of bringing forth offspring.

[Finn1928]

Some further support for your view, c-section is often referred to as a 'Cesarean Birth'. ex: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/cesarean-section#:~:text=Cesarean%20section%2C%20C%2Dsection%2C,and%2Ddown%20(vertical).

If c-sections don't count as births, I think we should start celebrating peoples' 'expulsion day' rather than birthday.

[oliviahobai]

You're both right that many instances of the Birth process are unnatural or partly unnatural. To start, how's this instead ?
Birth: The process of delivering one's offspring
I changed "bringing forth" to "delivering" because it's more frequent in natural language
Now there's a question of whether unnatural instances of Birth have multiple participants. To me, the mother is the Agent in every birth process, even in C-sections. But the doctor who performs her c-section is arguably bringing her baby forth and delivering her baby, too...
Additionally this is another case where it's still necessary to represent that some Births are natural processes while avoiding multiple parenthood

[johnbeve]

Updating, see #801