Except that it isn't a religious thing. I don't know if it was natural selection or societal pressure causing artificial selection, but human's are something of an evolutionary anomaly in the sense that the only other animals on earth who go through menopause are a few species of whales. There's a whole evolutionary hypothesis tied to it called the grandmother hypothesis. Or you can watch this PBS video about it if you don't feel like reading. It's pretty interesting really.

Edit: I'm also just gonna paste a paragraph from the wikipedia if people want the tl;dr.

Evolutionary theory dictates that all organisms invest heavily in reproduction in order to replicate their genes. According to parental investment, human females will invest heavily in their young because the number of mating opportunities available to them and how many offspring they are able to produce in a given amount of time is fixed by the biology of their sex. This inter birth interval (IBI) is a limiting factor in how many children a woman can have because of the extended developmental period that human children experience. Extended childhood, like the extended post-reproductive lifespan for females, is relatively unique to humans.[8] Because of this correlation, human grandmothers are well-poised to provide supplemental parental care to their offspring's children. Since their grandchildren still carry a portion of their genes, it is still in the grandmother's genetic interest to ensure those children survive to reproduction.