....probably the health of the mother is first priority, and then the health of the infant. Anything that gets in the way of that is plain old wrong.

those seem to be mostly societies whre people are outdoors most of the rest of their lives, eating a diet of traditional foods and generally working hard in the sun. also most of those societies are in the tropical latitudes, so say forty days of seclusion is not going to deplete their Vitamin D stores,even though people who live in these latitudes tend to be darke rskinned and need more time in the sun than temperate zone palefaces like me. it;s sort of ike the menstrual huts of traditional societies; the break from routine and hard work is probably of healing value when ordinary daily life requires hard work outdoors most of the time

even here in the temperate zone, they say we make Vitamin D during the summer months to use during the wnter; inmany places winter sunshine is not strong enough to create vitamin d. (this is where the practice of taking cod liver ol came in, and traditionally many Scandinavians and Finns, though fair, have an oily skin that tans surprisingly well)

there was a great book that came out in the late 1980s by Jacqueline VIncent Priya called Borth without DOctors. she di an ethnographic stufy of a bunch of trantional societies in southeast Asia and their birthing practices...fascinating. now globalization and interference with traditional foodways etc may really rupture that balance between traditional agrarian or gathering lifestyle and motherinfant seclusion; I did a few papers on this topic when I wnet back to college in medical anthropology, especiailly on the baby formula industry.