History Fridge / TheGiver

** Lowry addressed this a bit more in ''Son'', the last of three sequels to ''The Giver''; it's a different type of FridgeBrilliance. While the difficulty of pregnancy is mitigated a bit by the fact that their entire job is being pregnant (as opposed to the modern world where pregnant women will almost always have ''some'' level of other obligations), childbirth is still difficult and painful, albeit possibly to a lesser degree than it is in our world -- but ''no one else knows that''. If you think about it, the world at large being generally familiar with the nature of pregnancy and childbirth (at least enough to know that it's no easy feat) is only the case because of the way such things work in our world, namely that enough women go through the process that most people will have ''some'' experience with it, either by being pregnant themselves or knowing someone who is, and these kinds of details have seeped into the cultural consciousness as a result. In the ''Giver'' universe, the entire process is kept isolated from the community at large; only the Birthmothers themselves and a handful of other people (like the doctors) know the truth about what it's really like, and they're presumably under orders not to talk about it to anyone else. The Community at large literally doesn't know that pregnancy and childbirth are hard. All they see is girls sitting around not being required to "work" as they understand the term, and since they've pretty much been programmed not to have the curiosity to look beyond that, they just assume that what they perceive is the full extent of it.