January 22

[omorka]

. . . A closer look at the historical and ethnographic record reveals mothers who respond to a range of circumstances with a fairly predictable range of emotions. Their responses to infants remain consistent across vast spans of time and space, in the face of bewilderingly variable social histories. These consistencies remind us that we descend from creatures for whom the timing of reproduction has always made an enormous difference, and that the physiological and motivational underpinnings of a quintessentially "pro-choice" mammal are not new. These consistencies in maternal nature transcend historical peculiarities, and the vagaries of local ecologies and demography. It was not the response of mothers in ancient Rome, or eighteenth-century France, or twentieth-century Brazil that was unnatural. In fact, what was unnatural was the unusually high proportion of very young females, or females under dismal circumstances, who, in the absence of other forms of birth control, conceived and carried to term babies unlikely to prosper.
- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection

Read it. Seriously. No matter your position on the abortion debate, Hrdy's story of the reproductive choices - of all sorts - that primates, especially (but far from exclusively) we, make is powerful and eye-opening. But know this, also: no matter what your position, or your own reproductive status - parent, alloparent, or removed from the matter of children entirely - at some point in the reading, your hands will shake.