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Found some statistics that in American colonial days 1% to 1.5% of all births resulted in maternal death. Since women had multiple births, as a rule, probably one in eight to one in ten women died in childbirth.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/childbirth.cfm

I’m not sure this rate was high enough to significantly outweigh the higher male death rate from war and accidents.

I think we get this impression because we have so many records of older widows marrying a succession of young wives. But the primary reason for this was that older, financially established men were prime catches in the marriage market and were quickly snapped up.

To discuss the issue, we first have to decide which type of society we’re going to discuss. American colonists had little in common with Russian peasants or medieval Egyptian peasants.

A 1% difference in death rates will give you tremendous imbalances over time. They are not just cumulative, they are compounded.

Let's say we have a population of 1000 men and 1000 women. If the men's death rate were 1% per annum, you'd lose 253 of those men in 30 years.

If the women's death rate is 2% per annum, you'd lose 443 of those women in 30 years.

Obviously you'd run out of women before you did men. But the principle is the same ~ as long as there's a difference in the death rates, particularly in the younger cohorts, you will eventually have an overbalance of one sex or the other. Currently our society has an overbalance of women. It used to have an overbalance of men. The only big change is we eliminated the maternal death rate for all practical purposes, and that was through the use of antibiotics.

Nations without widespread availability of antibiotics continue to have a high maternal death rate ~ and that prevails whether or not they use abortion for birth control. That's because abortions undertaken without the use of antibiotics have a high death rate.

The abortion rights crowd occasionally argues that abortion has eliminated maternal deaths YET we can look at the availability of antibiotics and their use is the cause for fewer women dying in childbirth.

Life was probably safer for the European peasants than it was for American colonists ~ particularly in that very critical late 1500 period when there was a serious drought. The Spaniards putting down the geographic boundary markers in South Carolina were killed by the Indians and may well have been eaten. They'd been getting along great up to the time the crops failed.

The death rate at Jamestown in the early 1600s was INCREDIBLE. Almost everybody who came there for the first 20 years died shortly after arrival.