jwaneeta

Thank you: I do feel credited. I try to be a good mother, but I was very depressed (not enough to need drugs, but quite unhappy) for the first month or so after my daughter was born, and felt like such an unnatural mother for not being able to feel more cheerful.

There's a wonderful book out there by Sarah Blaffer(?) Hrdy, called "Mother Nature", which is all about the mothering instinct, mother love, etc. She looks at all kinds of species including humans, and here is her conclusion: bullshit. There is no instinctive "mother love".

What there IS, instinctively and hard-wired, is Baby Love. Babies love their mothers. It is their best and only power in a world in which they are completely helpless, to induce the person who matters more to their survival than anything on earth to respond favourably to them.

And we do. Mothers respond to their baby's love, to that heartbreaking smile of open delight lighting up the room whenever the face of mummy looks in the doorway, by learning to love them in turn (and are heavily supported in this response by their entire society of course). It happens with greater or lesser speed, but it happens a lot of the time. Most of the time, probably. Without it the human race wouldn't survive.

But while all babies love their mothers, mothers love - and raise - the babies they can afford to love and raise. Which isn't all of them,all of the time.

My sister, an activist, disapproves of Mother Teresa because she disapproved of abortion. But I think at least Mother Teresa was putting her money where her mouth was, as you say. If you oppose abortion, there are consequences. Who will raise the children whose mothers had decided before their birth they could not afford, for one reason or another, to keep? If you oppose abortion, you had better give them an option.