She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

By Susan Caba
December 9, 1999

Human mothers kill their own children. Men murder much more often than women. But when a woman causes the death of another, that person is most likely to be her own newborn baby. It happens a lot, it has happened throughout history and it sometimes happens in epidemic proportions, with thousands of babies quietly being killed or abandoned.

Any sentient adult with a subscription to a newspaper knows that Susan Smith drowned her toddlers in 1994 by strapping them into their car seats and letting the car roll into a lake. Three years later, a high school girl in New Jersey went to the prom, gave birth in a bathroom, left the baby to die in a garbage can and returned to the dance. In October, authorities in Kansas City, Mo., charged a 31-year-old mother with murder after two of her 8-year-old triplets were found to have been starved and scalded to death.

We think of these events as aberrations. We want to believe that they are rare, unaccountable occasions when drugs or psychosis or abject terror overwhelm the steadfast ramparts of maternal instinct.

But what about the village in Bolivia where researchers found that nearly every woman had killed a newborn of her own during a period of war and economic stress in the 1930s, when the prospects of raising a child with a suitable father were extremely poor? Nearly 38 percent of the babies born in that village during a three-year period were killed by their mothers. Many of those women went on to become devoted mothers.

And in Europe, during the middle centuries of this millennium, babies -- millions of them -- were abandoned to near-certain death in foundling homes by mothers who would have known their newborns would not be adequately fed by wet-nurses. At some of these homes, death rates reached 80 percent or higher.

In one village in Papua New Guinea, 41 percent of all live infants born between 1974 and 1978 were killed by their parents just after birth. Of 20 infants killed, five were boys, the rest girls.

These stark images of mass maternal abandonment and killing come from a new book on motherhood by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in which she proposes that in humans -- more than in any other species -- mother love is a sometime thing, a compulsion dependent on circumstances, not just hormones.

In fact, she says, there is no such thing as "the maternal instinct."

"Mothers do not automatically and unconditionally respond to giving birth in a nurturing way," says Hrdy (there is no vowel in the last name, which is the Czech word for "proud").

"A woman who is committed to being a mother will learn to love any baby, whether it's her own or not; a woman not committed to or prepared for being a mother may well not be prepared to love any baby, not even her own."

In her just-published book, "Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection," Hrdy says that women, like other primates, make a choice about mothering. They consider the availability of food, shelter, a father -- and the costs of those things -- in deciding whether to do the job. As coldly modern as this assessment process may seem, it is as old as the species, as deeply ingrained in our psyches and in our biological histories as any of our other basic urges, says Hrdy.

By cracking the divine mysteries of mothering with such a dry-eyed and rational code, Hrdy takes on a powerful coalition of folks for whom the idea of maternal instinct is sacrosanct. Groups like the Family Research Council, Promise Keepers, Marriage Savers, the Heritage Council and attachment parents everywhere use the biological certainty of maternal instinct to anchor conservative political arguments and traditional approaches to parenting. Theirs is a brand of motherly love that psychologist Erich Fromm described in his 1956 book "The Art of Loving." "Mother's love is unconditional," he rhapsodized, "it is all protective, all enveloping."

Stalwartly scientific and openly feminist, Hrdy rejects what she views as a pie-in-the-sky construct that conveniently reduces women to one essential feature: the ability to give birth and nurture offspring. She claims, from high atop an enormous mound of research, that her motives are strictly scientific, not political.

"I'm trying to get away from the pop, pat answers that people throw around," Hrdy says in an interview, frequently cautioning against what she calls the unsophisticated use of the word "instinct."