This must refer only to physical death, I am presuming. So, are you saying that all of Paul's comparisons that we have been talking about are between eternal spiritual life and only physical death? Doesn't it make more sense that he was comparing spiritual life and spiritual death? Don't all of us, as Christians, believe that physical death is merely a transition, it's what happens after that is important? "Eternally" speaking, isn't physical death, to us, really no big deal?
We do not believe that the Theotokos was born without the results of ancestral sin, in the sense of the tendency to death and corruption. We do believe that she lived a morally guiltless life, and was thus a worthy vessel for the conception and birth of Christ. We do not believe that "the fix was in" for her. We believe that she had no other tools at her disposal than the ones we do.
I think I would find this much more plausible if you said the fix WAS in. :) Mary had no other help than the rest of us, and yet she turns out to be the only human in the history of mankind (except Jesus) to choose to never sin? And, it was just a coincidence that this person turned out to be a woman? And, it was just a coincidence that she lived in an area that would bring her to Bethlehem for a census? And, it was just a coincidence that her lineage happened to be perfectly in line with scriptural requirements? I'm sure there are more. Without a special dispensation from God, what are the odds that one and only one person out of billions and billions would "choose" to never sin? I don't see it.
I see no need to look on it as either coincidence or as coersion. As the Scripture says, Christ came "in the fullness of time..." I don't think it is terribly profitable to try to describe it in other than those Biblical terms.
As we have belabored on this thread repeatedly, prophecy is not a blueprint that God wrote in the past, then manipulating things in such a way to make sure everyone followed his blueprint in the future, lest he look stupid for having put something in his blueprint that wasn't followed.
This implies that God has a past and a future.
Prophecy is God speaking from outside time to us who are inside time. He inspires someone from our past to foretell what will happen in our future. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that.
I don't think that when the Gospels say things like "that the Scripture might be fulfilled," they mean that Christ was play-acting and reading lines from a script. They are simply a literary way of reminding the readers that this or that event had been prophesied long ago. It is a way of saying that the God of the Christians is the very same God the Hebrews had worshipped all along. It is also another way of showing what Orthodox Christians have always believed: that "the Lord God" of the Old Testament is none other than the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity.
This is why every icon of Christ has, in the nimbus behind Christ's head, the Greek words "o on" (sorry, unlike Kolokotronis, I don't know how to do omicron and omega in html) -- which are the words in the LXX by which the Lord identifies himself to Moses from the burning bush when Moses asks him who he should say has sent him: "He who is." (Unlike translations based on the Hebrew, the LXX uses a clearly masculine pronoun, incidentally.)