Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

444 J HOW THE MIND WORKSdesperate straits, such as from a famine. Infanticide in the modern Westis similar. The statistics show that the mothers who let their infants dieare young, poor, and unwed. There are many explanations, but the parallelwith the rest of the world is unlikely to be a coincidence.Infanticidal mothers are not heartless, and even when infant mortalityis common, people never treat young life casually. Mothers experienceinfanticide as an unavoidable tragedy. They grieve for the child andremember it with pain all their lives. In many cultures people try to distancetheir emotions from a newborn until they are assured it will survive.They may not touch, name, or grant legal personhood to a babyuntil a danger period is over, much like our own customs of the christeningand the bris (the circumcision of eight-day-old Jewish boys).The emotions of new mothers, which would drive the decision tokeep a baby or let it die, may have been shaped by these actuarial facts.Postpartum depression has been written off as a hormonal delirium, butas with all explanations of complex emotions, one must askwhy the brainis wired so as to let hormones have their effects. In most of human evolutionaryhistory, a new mother had good reason to pause and take stock.She faced a decision between a definite tragedy now and a chance of aneven greater tragedy years hence, and the choice was not to be takenlightly. Even today, the typical rumination of a depressed new mother—how will I cope with this burden?—is a genuine issue. The depression ismost severe in the circumstances that lead mothers elsewhere in theworld to commit infanticide, such as poverty, marital conflict, and singlemotherhood.The emotional response called "bonding" is also surely more sophisticatedthan the stereotype in which a woman is smitten with a lifelongattachment to her baby if she interacts with it in a critical window afterbirth, like the victims of Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream whobecame infatuated with the first person they saw upon awakening.Mothers appear to proceed from a cool assessment of the infant andtheir current prospects, to an appreciation of the infant as a uniquelywonderful individual after about a week, to a gradual deepening of loveover the next few years.The infant is an interested party, and fights for its interests with theonly weapon at its disposal: cuteness. Newborns are precociously responsiveto their mothers; they smile, make eye contact, perk up to her speech,even mimic her facial expressions. These advertisements of a functioningnervous system could melt a mother's heart and tip the balance in a close