Basically, you need government to keep people orderly, so that they can aspire to higher things than basic survival.
Other animals appear to do just fine. Have we a right to a long, painless life? Could we have, perhaps, just let evolution taken its course and women's bodies become more adept? Human bodies as a whole more resistant? The rise of cities only contributed to disease spreading. Certainly infant mortality seems bad, but is it for the worst? People dying is exactly what we need to keep populations stable, babies, women or otherwise. With governments, we have successfully achieved overpopulation, morbid obesity, climate change, mass extinctions, holocausts and potential nuclear war.
Also, most people (at least on Europe) prior to the introduction of sugar had perfectly healthy teeth; peasants in particular:
"The average medieval European peasant actually had very strong teeth and few problems with decay. In fact, based on surveys of archaeological data, only 20 percent of teeth found at medieval sites showed any sign of decay. By contrast, some early 20th century populations showed decay on 90 percent of teeth, and today even with all our modern knowledge half of American teenagers have tooth decay."
While I see your point, all those good things you mentioned come at a huge, huge cost. Is it worth it?
(I'm not taking a side here, I'm just sort of playing).
IMO other animals don’t do “just fine.”
Yes, in agrarian/HG societies you (often) have a sense of community, but as I and others have pointed out, you still have some form of rule of law even in a single village.
The communal sharing also tends to be within the
one village or town, but even there the weak are often outcast and die miserable deaths, whether they started strong or not.
Without government-supplied organizations like police and fire departments, as well as mail, road, garbage, health, waste maintenance services, etc....things get messy very fast.
When the society grows to be large enough for more than one gathering/village, then rules of how those two or more townships should relate to one another and protect one another from other groups of towns and other societies must also be formed.
Greater and greater numbers of any animal type, particularly an animal that communicates and socially interacts, as well as remembers and holds hatred for others, requires oversight, and enforcers of said oversight.
But getting back to the animals; yes, we could live like small troupes of monkeys and simply survive, being happy to reproduce enough offspring to survive the hardships of life without technology. And when whatever large stressor comes along, we will become extinct, just like any herd or species of grazing animals or fish.
Perhaps that is the point of government. Government allows a species, particularly a species with long-term memory, language and tool use capability, as well as the ability to plan
years in advance
to avoid extinction, by keeping people safe and orderly, so that over time they can aspire to higher things than basic monotonous survival.
