5/18/2024

Quite a lot of tension is due to the significant mismatch between our biology and what modern society expects of us. We demonize teen pregnancy despite the fact that it is normal for people to start bearing children in their teen years. We encourage our teens to avoid serious relationships until after college. Again, this is not normal for our species. For decades our society has undertaken the project of convincing everyone that men and women are the same. We pretend that men and women are interchangeable and that we simply need to educate people on this point. Finally we have progressed to the point of denying the importance of gender all together.

I spend quite a lot of time thinking about the wellbeing of mothers. The reason is this: despite our incredible wealth, opportunity, and freedom, postpartum mothers are not doing well at all. I think it is because we are ignoring the way God made us. We are casting aside our biology in favor of a model of motherhood dictated and shaped by industrialized consumeristic society.

During my training as a lactation counselor at the Healthy Children’s Project, I learned that humans are a “carrying” species. Our milk is relatively watery. This means our babies need to breastfeed frequently. Mothers in carrying species are always with their little nurslings. This is different than species that stow their babies away in nests. These kinds of animals have milk with higher fat concentration. Their babies can be left alone.

However modern humans do stow our babies away. We are a carrying species that stows our babies away. We stow them in cribs and in strollers. We stow them in daycares. Moms and babies are often separated even for long periods of time. It is a glaring mismatch in what society requires and what our biology is telling us we should do.

More than one mom has told me she cannot sleep without touching her baby, feeling her baby breathe, or having her baby at the breast. This is biology. It is God’s design. Yet from the beginning of life hospitals enforce separation between the mom and baby. Instead of adjusting mattresses and bedding, instead of adjusting the schedules of nurses who could attend to mothers and babies to enable safe co-sleeping, the mothers and babies are the ones who are forced to accommodate. This is traumatic. Indeed, a profoundly high percentage of women experience traumatic experiences during and after childbirth. (See this article.)

Our modern industrialized society has been a blessing in many ways, but we cannot overlook the new problems that have arisen. While modern society embraces many practices and technologies that do enhance human flourishing, those same practices can be taken too far. People become cogs in the system. The system becomes an end in itself, developing a momentum independent of the well-being of the real humans it is supposed to serve.

We must keep in mind our nature. We must respect the way God made us.