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Sophie's choice
A Canadian court will decide whether Sophie Brassard must give her children a drug cocktail or lose them to a foster home.
By Alyson Mead
[12/08/99]

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By David Brauer
[12/07/99]

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I tried acupuncture, strumming my veins and "Shocking Brain Surgery." But nothing could prepare me for witnessing my son's birth.
By Aaron Shure
[12/07/99]

Trapped and torn
Locked in by a chain of protesters, I wanted to kick myself. My kids were at home and I was about to be pummeled for all the wrong reasons.
By Lisa Guide
[12/03/99]

Wild in the streets
What better place to find a hottie than at a riot conveniently taking place in my neighborhood?
By Annie Culver
[12/03/99]

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But these responses cannot be threaded together into a single strand of behavior and labeled "maternal instinct," and they don't guarantee that an infant will be loved or cared for. In other words, we are subject to maternal impulses, but we are not controlled or defined by them. Even behaviors that can be traced to physiological factors -- genes or hormones or neural pathways that form after a female gives birth -- may be more complex than they seem.

Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection By Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Pantheon Books, 752 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

What about prolactin, the hormone with the general reputation of promoting nurturing behavior? A "land mine," says Hrdy. "It's implicated" in nurturing, defensive and protective behavior (even in males), she says, but its presence in the body is also correlated with other emotional tendencies, including aggression and postpartum depression.

In other words, do not expect any simple descriptions of the influence of prolactin -- or any other gene or hormone -- on maternal behavior from Hrdy. She sidesteps the sound bite at every turn.

"Everyone warned me not to touch the topic," she says. "I pushed the boundaries as far as I could, but my words were chosen very, very carefully."

Hrdy relies on decades of research -- her own and others' -- to propose a sort of Darwinian-feminist theory of motherhood: Women are influenced by certain physical factors to form families, have children and nurture them, but the decision to raise children also is shaped by ambition and ambivalence (which may also be influenced by evolved traits -- it's a bit of a vicious circle).

Babies, on the other hand, are genetically programmed to form an attachment to a trusted caretaker. The bond is essential to their emotional development, which creates the classic dilemma for modern (and postmodern) mothers -- how to balance work and parenthood.

Primate mothers, says Hrdy, from apes to Pleistocene-era foragers to women today, have had to weigh motherhood against their need to work and maintain status in their communities. Female animals -- including humans -- assess their "economic" situation, the politics of the times, their community stature and the probability of raising offspring to maturity in deciding whether to "invest" in raising a child.

Like women in recent decades, other animals have some ability to forestall fertility or conception if the times aren't right for child-rearing. Some even end their pregnancies, if the outlook for success changes, by absorbing the fetus into their bodies.

Only human mothers, says Hrdy, carry the results of their assessments to the most brutal end. In other primates, infanticide is either carried out by males killing the offspring of their rivals or dominant females killing the babies of potential competitors. And humans are the only primates to assess the viability of their infants and then choose whether to keep them based on their health or gender.

In other words, Hrdy says, maternal love -- and particularly human maternal love -- is conditional. It has been so since at least the Pleistocene era, she says, despite cries from conservatives and fundamentalist Christians who say that we must return to the family values of a nebulous bygone era -- with men in their rightful places at the head of households and women birthing and nurturing -- to put an end to school shootings and Susan Smith tragedies.

Hrdy, of course, offers an evolutionary biologist's assessment of the Smith killings, an assessment based on Canadian studies that show younger women are more likely to commit infanticide than older women, particularly when a male other than the child's father is present in a relationship. This is presumably because younger women see the opportunity of forming new families, while older women realize their child-bearing years are dwindling.

"Susan Smith was looking to better her life and the kids were in the way," Hrdy says. "She could look forward to having other children. If Susan Smith had been 40, I wouldn't have expected her to kill her children."

Infanticide is one way women throughout history -- those without access to birth control or abortion -- have terminated their investment in offspring when conditions weren't right for motherhood. Hrdy doesn't offer it as an excuse, just an explanation.

"Along the way," she says. "I have come to understand just how flexible parental emotions in humans can be."

Hrdy, 53, is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California at Davis, with a lengthy résumé that begins at Radcliffe and Harvard and wends its way through membership in the National Academy of Sciences. She's been studying maternal behavior for three decades, with research encompassing everything from field studies of langur monkeys in India to a thorough combing of centuries worth of birth records and even telephone directories in Europe, documenting the epidemics of infant abandonment.

She has a disarming and amusing way of describing herself in anthropological terms, fully cognizant of the elastic application of evolutionary dogma: "What does it mean," she asks in the book's introduction, "to be born a mammal, with an emotional legacy that makes me capable of caring for others, breeding with the ovaries of a primate, possessing the mind of a human being. To be a semi-continuously sexually receptive, hairless biped, filled with conflicting aspirations and struggling to maintain her balance in a rapidly changing world?"

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