Mother\'s Love: Death Without Weeping

Mother's Love: Death Without Weeping

This article by Nancy Scheper-Hughes was first published in the October 1989 issue of Natural History. The relationship between the unremitting death of infant children, abject poverty, and a mother's ability to express maternal love is the central theme of this article. The article addresses conditions in Alto do Cruzerio, a remote shantytown in northeast Brazil. The town's high fertility and high infant mortality rate works to create an atmosphere where the death of a child is the norm for poor families and mothers do not grieve when a frail child dies. Because of this norm certain children's lives are forsaken because mothers invest only in those infants likely to survive and distance themselves psychologically from vulnerable infants, withholding love and care. This selective neglect may be interpreted as a defense mechanism in order to allow mothers to cope with the overwhelming loss of a child.

Discussion

Scheper-Hughes notes that in 1965 more than 350 babies died in Alto, a town with a population of a little more than 5,000. The average woman of Alto experiences 9.5 pregnancies, 3.5 child deaths, and 1.5 stillbirths. Seventy percent of all child deaths in the town occur within the first six months, and 82% within the first year of life. "Part of learning how to be a mother in Alto is learning when to let go of a child who shows that it wants to die or has no knack or taste for life. Another part is learning when it is safe to let oneself love a child." The dire psychological conditions that permit a mother to condition her feelings predicated on the probability of the survival of her child are in my opinion appalling.

However, there are contributing factors that permit this occurrence. Children born in Alto lack the traditional protection of breastfeeding, subsistence gardens, stable marriages, and multiple adult caregivers. In these shantytowns that spring up around urban centers marriages are "brittle" and single parenting the norm. Woman are forced to seek employment, working as domestics or in the fields of the sugar plantation for as little as a dollar a day, and cannot bring their babies with them, consequently older children who are not in school will sometimes serve as babysitters, however children who are not in school are also expected to find work, thus babies are simply "left at home alone, the door securely fastened." Many babies die alone and unattended.

Another factor that exacerbates the situation is religious doctrine. The Catholic Church's official position against birth control, abortion, and sterilization only adds to the number of children born into this untenable situation. Scheper-Hughes notes that the seeming indifference of Alto mothers toward the death of their infants is a reflection of the official indifference of the church and state to their predicament.