A romantic could argue, if they were so inclined, that the conquest of maternal mortality has made the world a shallower place. In the early 1800s, you could tell stories whose emotional power rested — explicitly or silently — on the universal knowledge that childbirth meant mortal danger. Today, our high school English teachers have to explain this to us when we read Jane Austen or Emily Brontë, just so we understand, on an intellectual level, how brave the women in their novels were.
Such conquests have become commonplace.
As the world becomes safer — as one after another edifice of human suffering crumbles before the collective might of science, technology, and industrial society — it becomes harder to harness the emotional power of tragedy, risk, adversity, and heroism. The lives of more individuals become childlike, pure, and unmarked — or at least a little bit more so than before.