What is a "Mother"?

A follow-on question from Matt Walsh’s question “What is a “woman”?

Image by sentavio</a> on Freepik

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the word “mother” when used as a noun is defined as:

- a woman in relation to her child or children

And when used as a verb:

- give birth to

- bring up (a child) with care and affection

I know there are many ways to be a mother. In this post I am not going to talk about some of the ways that women mother their children. If you became a mother via adoption or fostering, I salute you. At times, I found being a mother to several small humans really challenging and only the memory of how they felt inside of me and how they emerged kept me in there, caring for them as they deserved to be cared for. That many adoptive mother/child pairs bond in a similar fashion to birthmother/baby pairs is a tribute to the malleability of human nature and the persistence of good faith practice.

There are many ways to be a mother...

Pregnancy: the connection between you and your baby

Pregnancy follows a well-known and predictable course for every woman on the planet, regardless of whose genetic material is used or how it got into a uterus. In every pregnancy from the ‘old fashioned’ variety (where through penetrative sexual intercourse a man ejaculates into a vagina semen containing sperm that meets a receptive ovum resulting in a conception) through to a lab inserted embryo created from donor gametes, a successful pregnancy proceeds in the same order.

Make no mistake: pregnancy changes everything.

There are no bodily systems in women that do not make adaptations to growing a fetus into a baby. Some of these changes are a permanent record on a woman’s body that at one point she carried a future human being.

Fetal cells migrate through the placenta, entering the maternal system and lodge permanently in women’s brains, hearts, bone marrow and other organs.

Even women who never manage to carry a baby to term (and so never ‘mother’ a child) will have cells from her fetus remaining within her as a lifelong legacy.

Pregnant women metabolize drugs differently than they did before becoming pregnant so may need adjustments to their medications if they have conditions such as thyroid disorders or diabetes.

The placenta: a necessary alien invader

Babies are able to develop inside mammalian female bodies because of the placenta. Placentas are a truly amazing adaptation; they are the only organ in the human body that are specially created for just one purpose and when no longer needed are discarded totally. Often referred to as a “maternal” organ, they are anything but as they are constructed and grown from the fertilized egg so contain only half of the genetic content from the mother, with the other half being comprised of the father’s DNA.

Most people understand the basic functions of the placenta, which is to support the growing baby by supplying oxygen and nutrients and taking away carbon dioxide and waste products, acting as lungs and the digestive system. But the placenta also acts as an independent gland, producing its own hormones to support the pregnancy, while at the same time preparing the maternal body for breastfeeding. It is also an immune regulator, preventing the woman’s body from rejecting that foreign DNA introduced by the male and passing on immunity from the mother to her baby (which is why vaccination in pregnancy is so important for the health of new babies).  

A healthy placenta isn’t just a ‘nice to have’ feature in pregnancy; it is vital for a baby’s wellbeing and survival. Placental problems are at the heart of pre-eclampsia and any placental insufficiency can mean babies are born too early or too small. The placenta used to be thought of as a barrier between a woman and her baby, but this is untrue and toxins such as alcohol and smoking can have a permanent deleterious effect on babies as the placenta does not ‘filter out’ these.

Placentas are also like traffic police in that they modify and direct maternal resources that are needed by the fetus and are the communication channel between a woman and her baby.

If the placenta implants in the wrong place in the uterus, the results can be life threatening for both women and babies; in the most severe cases of placenta acreta, the only way to prevent maternal death through hemorrhage is an emergency hysterectomy.

A woman’s body is both the environment and ecosystem for the baby she is carrying. Her history is embedded in her body and will influence every baby she grows. Factors such as hypoxia, stress, obesity, diabetes, toxins, altered nutrition, inflammation, and reduced utero-placental blood flow all have the prospect of altering fetal development in a way that can impact on the health status of a child for their entire life.

“There is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone.” DW Winnicott

When a baby is born and placed on the unclothed chest of his or her mother and mother and baby gaze at each other, neither of them is meeting a stranger for the first time. Like two pen pals finally meeting in person after a long correspondence, both the baby and the woman who has given birth are meeting someone they already know quite intimately.

That first golden hour after birth sets up both mothers and babies for long term optimized health. Skin to skin on their mother stabilizes a baby’s heart rate, breathing, temperature and blood sugars. Her smell primes a baby for breastfeeding and creates the relaxing atmosphere of contact for babies that means they will not cry as much during the first year as those who missed out on this irreplaceable time.

Immediate separation of a mother and baby can lead to toxic stress that impacts for the rest of their lives.

Babies and the women who gestate and birth them have a relationship that is already well established at the time of birth. Arbitrarily separating this dyad causes harm to both of them.

What is the point of surrogate pregnancy?

Well of course the easy answer is to create a baby, while having no physical investment in the process.

For some women, they don’t want the career interruption: “I was terrified of putting my life on hold for two-plus years. In my industry, it feels like you’re easily forgotten if you don’t work within the next month of your last job.” It seems that being a mother is OK (maybe because you can outsource a child’s care?), but investing through pregnancy is asking too much?

For gay couples, becoming dads through a natural pregnancy is an impossibility. Some feel they have a “right” to use a woman this way and that children don’t need mothers.

Some women have infertility problems that despite current reproductive technologies that are available, means pregnancy is not on the table for them. Personally, I cannot imagine a greater sorrow than to want a child and be unable to have one.

Whatever the rationale is though, in the end this is how babies are bought and how adult wants are satisfied. For if you read through from the start of this post, you will know that women and their fetuses are bonded before birth and that by simply carrying a baby, physiology effects and changes both parties’ lives forever.

To want to have a child is a natural human emotion, but to deliberately create one in the knowledge that it will cause harm to both the baby and the woman who is paid for her “gestation services” is unethical in the same way that buying an existing child would be.

Adoption is when everyone is making the best choice they can out of unfortunate circumstances, but surrogacy is the deliberate creation of trauma, while at the same time justifying one’s actions by ignoring or minimizing the impacts of harm.

Adoption does have lessons to learn from, but these never seem to be considered in the news reports of surrogate births.

How to create damaged babies

The short answer is to permanently separate them from their mothers.

It is immaterial to a baby where the egg they grew from originated. From a baby’s perspective, where they developed and grew is in the body of their mother and they are not aware of any contracts or money that legally states otherwise. Babies have no interest in academic theories or esoteric claims of ownership.

Babies are primed to eat the family foods their mothers have been consuming and are attuned to the sound of her voice and her unique heart rate. Breastfeeding cements these into a baby’s positive brain development. But the many and myriad health optimizing benefits of breastfeeding will be denied to babies born from surrogacy. Even in the rare cases where a birth mother pumps and donates her own breast milk to the commissioning parents, this is not the same as breastfeeding.

Chronic stress during pregnancy impacts on infant socioemotional development that is measurable. Giving away a baby is not a feature of mammalian birth and I believe that the deliberate choice not to engage with a growing fetus would be stressful for any woman.

And that golden hour after birth cannot be replicated by skin to skin contact with anyone else other than the birth mother.

“Gestational carriers” are all women

Surrogacy commodifies not just babies, but women as well. “Rent a womb” services are not without peril for the women paid to produce babies for others. Women acting as surrogates are undertaking a high-risk emotional experience that can also turn into a high-risk physical experience. Please note the economic differences between “commissioning parents” and “gestational carriers”.

Particularly for a woman undergoing surrogacy with a donor egg, rather than her own egg, there are much higher risks for preterm birth, low birth weight, maternal gestational diabetes, gestational hypertension, pre-eclampsia and placenta previa. Even if high blood pressure and gestational diabetes abate after birth, women remain at a higher risk of developing these conditions in later life. Women who develop pre-eclampsia are at a higher risk of cardiovascular problems at a later point. And they take these problems into their next pregnancy, even if it’s with their own baby.

For women who have a baby, failure to breastfeed is associated with an increased incidence of premenopausal breast cancer, ovarian cancer, retained gestational weight gain, type 2 diabetes, myocardial infarction, and metabolic syndrome.

Sheehan’s syndrome is a risk associated with severe hemorrhage during the perinatal period; it happens usually as a result of major blood loss following birth. High levels of blood loss cause pituitary necrosis, which means that part of the pituitary gland dies. The consequences for women are truly catastrophic because this small gland, located deep in our brains is the control center for nearly every important hormone that keeps us alive and functioning well. This inevitably leads to increased morbidity and once diagnosed, women will be on a complicated regime of oral hormones for the remainder of their lives.

This tiny gland controls everything we need to keep us healthy and alive.

Women taking on a surrogate pregnancy are usually already mothers to their own children. One of the known results of surrogate pregnancy is death. How are children to be compensated for the loss of their mother? Is there enough money in the known universe to replace a mother?

Are prospective surrogates told all of this? Are they making a true, informed consent decision or are they dazzled by all the warm fuzzies of “creating a family” for others, not to mention the financial perks (even in countries where “commercial” surrogacy is banned)?

A woman’s body will prepare for the birth of a baby, even if that baby “doesn’t belong” to the woman. Oxytocin floods her body just prior to, during and just after every birth, priming her to bond with her baby. What might happen to a hormonal system’s derailment when there is no baby? Is anybody even asking?

It concerns me greatly that mothers are giving their children the message that getting pregnant and giving birth do not automatically lead to getting a new sibling. How are children supposed to be reassured that whatever they do, their mothers will continue to love them (and keep them) when some babies are “not for our family”? Children of divorced parents often feel responsible for the breakup of their families. I can see no reason why similar doubts and concerns won’t plague other children whose mothers ‘give away’ a child.

Who is the “mother” here?

In some surrogate situations there are many women involved. Who gets to claim the title of “mother”? The egg donor (it’s her genetic material)? The womb haver (it’s her body changing the very nature of the fetus she is carrying)? The payer (it’s her money)? What about the cases where because the parents have ‘important lives’ they hire staff to care for their newborn? Every baby born is desperate to become attached to one adult and this is vital for healthy development. But staff aren’t paid to love anyone and can be dismissed at any point.

The greatest power that anyone has ever had is the creation and sustenance of life itself and this is minimized when birth is taken over by an ideology of otherness. To support this is to support an ethos that ignores the human rights and agency of the most vulnerable humans on the planet in a quest to satisfy the wants of adults.