Mothers, Milfs, and Wives Pt 2

Ever wonder why we evolve to have childfree women and men? In this episode women are getting real about reproduction!

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Ever wonder why we evolved to havechild free men and women. They were
important to our evolution too. Thisis part two of Mother's Mills and Wives,
a look at women's reproductive choices.Listen to part one if you haven't
already. In this episode, womenget real about reproduction. There's probably no

(00:25):
deeper heart wrenching emotional experience for womenthan the feelings that surround reproduction. Hope
for a baby, the loss ofa baby, the joy of a baby,
the worry over a baby, andthe feelings of sadness when a woman's
fertility window closes with no baby insight. Say I love you. That

(00:54):
was a good one. Welcome toMating Matters, the podcast that looks at
human behavior through a lens of evolutionarypsychology and human mating strategy. I'm doctor
Wendy Walsh. Humans are wired tobond and we're wired to reproduce, but

(01:15):
the risks and burden of reproduction seemto fall unfairly on women who face the
sometimes terrifying challenges of survival with childrenin tow and have to make heartbreaking decisions
about which babies get to survive.This isn't new. Our cave women ancestors

(01:36):
also faced harsh environments. A faminea millennium ago became a recession and job
loss today. They were presented withmates who may or may not have offered
paternal care like today's faithful, fastidiousfathers or dead be dads, and cave
women faced the sometimes spotty availability offamily and friends as helpers. Same problem

(02:00):
today. Yesterday's village of women hasbeen replaced by the baby Yoga group and
the preschool Parent Association. But nothis, whether you are a man or
a woman, you're here on theplanet today because your hunter gather ancestors whose
DNA runs through your blood were expertsin human mating and reproduction. Let's talk

(02:23):
about how mothers get it done,no doubt about it. Talk of female
reproductive choice can bring all kinds offierce emotions to the surface. Nothing is
more visceral for humans than the desireto create and protect life. Mother Nature
wired us that way. This isour human survival instinct at full throttle.

(02:47):
That's why we may judge others choices, because we evolve to be cooperative breeders
on some deep cellular level. Whena woman makes a reproductive choice that we
would make, say having too manychildren that she can't afford, or terminating
a pregnancy. Our shared instinct isto protect. In this podcast, I'm

(03:12):
going to ask you to work hardto keep the urge to judge in check.
Let's be social scientists together and growa greater understanding of the pressures and
choices all women face. Human beingsare problem solvers. We are constantly adapting
to a changing environment. Many modernwomen reproduce a lot like our hunter gatherer

(03:35):
ancestors. That is, they havetwo or three surviving children while avoiding a
death during childbirth. By the way, one big evolutionary trade off was narrow
hips for bipedal motion. Walking uprighton two feet required very narrow hips.
When we were down on all fours, hips were wider, pregnancies longer,

(03:57):
and deliveries were much safer. Tall, thin apes like us have a heck
of a time pushing out big headedbabies. Take a deep breath. I
got your baby. Push another,good man and breath. But our environment
has always been changing, and weare slowly changing in response. Lately,
advents in medicine and technology are newtools created to help women win the maiden

(04:23):
game. Before that, here's howthe reproductive lifespan looked for millions of years.
First of all, in our huntergather past, girls matured much later.
The age of puberty has been goingdown for the last century. We'll
have to do a whole episode ofmating matters on the factors involved in precocious
puberty. Did you know that tenpercent of girls get their first period at

(04:45):
the age of eight? For now, just know that in our ancient past,
girls got their first period in theirlate teens. It took about a
year for their periods to become regular, and then they were pregnant for like
a year. Back then, sincethere were no blenders or Gerber baby food,
babies were nursed breastfed until they gottheir two year old molars or even

(05:08):
years longer. Mother's bodies were themain source of protein until kids could chomp
on an animal leg and round theclock. Nursing suppresses ovulation and naturally spaces
babies years apart. It's natural birthcontrol. By the way, don't count
on it if you nightween or supplementwith bottles. I don't want to get

(05:28):
an email from you. Thus,human babies were naturally spaced about three to
five years apart. There was alsoa high infant mortality rate, and some
kids, let's face it, goteaten by predators. So once a woman
hit the end of her fertility windowin her forties, she likely had about
three children who actually survived into adulthood, and she spent most of her adult

(05:51):
life either pregnant or breastfeeding. Everytwo minutes one woman is diagnosed with breast
cancer somewhere in the United States.Every five women diagnosed, about one will
have her too positive breast cancer,a more aggressive form of the disease known
from putting its patients at a higherrisk of recurrence. Side note. One
of the reasons that modern women havesuch high rates of breast cancer is the

(06:14):
assault of estrogen on their breasts everytwenty eight days with menstruation. Our hunter
gatherers probably didn't have three hundred periodslike modern women do. If you get
periods, you know exactly what I'mtalking about. Every month, you shove
a little piece of cotton into yourvagina and that comes with a lot of
so delayed motherhood. Using modern contraceptionthat keeps women having those periods is a

(06:38):
new technological invention that helps women's spacebabies, but now increases the incidence of
hormone related cancers. According to theAmerican Institute for Cancer Research, women who
breastfeed for extended years have lower ratesof breast cancer. The advent of farming
was another technological age that women hadto navigate. Before that, hunter gatherer

(07:00):
women may have had years of serialmonogamy, say five to seven years,
where they depended on a great manto help with food and protection while the
kids were young. But with theadvent of farming, all women were expected
to do this with one man fora lifetime. They were also expected to
have many, many children because theyneeded labor for the farm. Now that

(07:23):
we're past farming and the Industrial Revolutionand into the information age, long term
monogamy has hung around. That's becauseit's still a successful reproductive choice for many
women. My husband I got marriedin March and I was pregnant in April.
I've known my husband for twenty fiveyears. We have been together for
nineteen and we've been married for nine. I have four children and one grandchild

(07:46):
and I've been married for almost twentyfive years. And thanks to another technology
unavailable to our hunter gatherers, spermdonation and artificial insemination, even same sex
couples can have long term monogamy withreproduction. This woman has been with her
now wife for twenty eight years.They have two sons in their twenties.

(08:07):
Did one of you bear them todo adopt them? Do you mind me
ask? Oh? I love thatyou had one. Yeah, And we
went through a sperm bank because youknow, we didn't want to go to
a friend that might knock on thedoor ten years later and say, hey,
can I take Johnny out for alittle while, because you know,
I helped. The payoffs to motherhoodare enormous. I think it made me

(08:28):
a much kinder person. I'd liketo think I was a nice person before,
but when you think about the factthat you are molding the future,
you know, and molding the nextgeneration, it really made me much more
empathetic to, you know, everybodyaround me. Humans are a fascinating primate
because we can love a child thatis not biologically ours. Until recently,

(08:50):
it was thought that we were theonly great ape. Oh pop quiz,
folks name the five great apes Chimpanzees. I knew you'd get that one right
away. Guerrillas, good orangutans,but no bos and yeo us Homo sapien

(09:11):
Okay, back to the lecture.Until recently, it was thought that we
were the only ape that adopted otherapes kids, but Christophe Bosch of the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology inGermany found eighteen cases where chimpanzees in West
Africa adopted orphan chimps, and thatadoptive parent was sometimes female and sometimes male.

(09:33):
I love men, Oh, thankyou very much. Because humans have
cooperative reading. Adoption has been along practice custom for couples who had problems
conceiving. Most humans have compassion forbabies without parents. Well, I think
you. We're in a financial positionto do it and can't devote the time.

(09:54):
There's so many kids in the worldthat don't have guidance, and it's
really sad. Well. I alwaysthought that if I ever actually did want
to have a family one day,that I would really like to have one
and then adopt one. I alwaysthought that that would be the most amazing,
perfect, beautiful way to do it. Our daughter is our biological child,

(10:16):
and I couldn't get pregnant after heragain, and so we had sadly
five adoptions fall through, but onthe fifth one we got our wonderful son.
So I was there at his birththen that he's just like part of
our family from the instant he gotinto our family. There is perhaps no
better theater to watch female reproductive choiceplay out than in the adoption arena.

(10:37):
It's highly emotional. Adoptive mothers waitand hope for a chance to nurture,
while birth mothers make life and deathsurvival decisions for themselves and their unborn babies.
Emotions run high. My husband andI went to the county initially,
and it was a roundfall about maybethirty couples, and one of the first

(10:58):
questions they asked was how many ofyou have children already? And my husband
and I were the only ones thatraised our hands, and everyone looked at
us, like, how dare youcome in here when you already have a
child and we don't have a child. So my husband and I stepped back
a bit and said, gee,you know, I don't want to take
that away from someone. Over severalyears, though, this woman and her
husband searched for a child through privateadoption five times. One of them was

(11:22):
in the service and her father washandling it and he found out we weren't
Jewish, and that was a problemfor him, so we couldn't get that.
We had a young girl who wastwelve years old and she was having
a baby, and I went tothe doctor's office and they said, please,
this young girl wants to give youthe baby because she can't take care
of it. And we found outthat the mother was approached by an infertile

(11:43):
couple and they said, we willput you up at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
We will buy you a car ifyou give us your child. So
then we said, Then we hada couple of other problems where the mother
decided to terminate the pregnacy, anotherone she decided to have it, and
then the last one where my husband, he's a psychiatrist, and he said,
let's not get involved in this lastone, wait until we had the
baby coming home to us. Thebaby was born, we named it,

(12:05):
we had the doctor check it out, and then the next day we got
a call from the mother's sister sayingshe wanted to keep the baby. Ironically,
this mother was a childbirth educator.She worked with pregnant women, and
yet she had to wait thirteen longyears for her adoptive son to arrive.
In the end, her new babycame to them through a personal contact.
A coworker of this woman's hairdresser suddenlybecame pregnant. She didn't, I guess,

(12:28):
have enough money for birth control,and she had conceived before, and
I taught her child with classes forher first child. And so then three
years later I went to the hairdresser. I don't go that often, and
I saw that she was pregnant andI said, oh, she's expecting another
child, and they said yes.And then my hairdodcher said, are you
still interested in adoption? And Isaid yes, but I don't think adoptions
interested in me. We've had quitea lot of trauma. And so she

(12:52):
said just a minute, she wentand talked with her, and the woman
came back over and said, Ican't think of anybody I'd rather have my
child than you. In the end, although one of her children was biological
and one came to her through adoption, she says she loves them both the
same. A lot of people say, don't you love your biological child more?
And absolutely not, absolutely not.And so sometimes my daughter says,
really, you don't love me moreand I said no, no, I

(13:13):
said, it's just I never thinkof him as being adopted. He's just
part of our family. Besides adoption, modern Homo sapien women have two other
technological tools to help them survive,in vitro fertilization and egg freezing. Young
women are now coveted in the workforceas we've entered the information age. Yes,

(13:33):
we are better talkers, better typers, and we have more social sensitivity
as a result. Reproductive survival todaymay involve using vital years of fertility to
build a nest egg. The solutionextend the fertility window by freezing eggs.
It may look like a party,but this is an information session for one

(13:56):
of a growing number of egg freezingboutiques. It's really just being coactive about
it run by entrepreneurs. This newdrop of egg freezing studios cause a fraction
of traditional IVF clinics. But there'ssomething that hasn't changed at all, the
necessity for allo parents. Allo parentsare extra adults, non biologically related to

(14:18):
children who help raise them. Onein five American women do not reproduce,
either by choice or circumstance, andthis is natural for our species. Think
about it. Mothers and fathers don'tparent alone in a vacuum. In fact,
we're not meant to do it alone. Here's anthropologist and primatologist doctor Sarah

(14:39):
Blafferherdie of UC Davis. Her bookMothers and Others makes a clear case that
all the extra parents are a bigreason our intelligence exploded so that we took
over the world. I mean,they are way more ants than us.
They're not in charge, and lionsare top of the food chain, but
they don't run the show. Wewere the brains on top, hartly because

(15:03):
of valoe parents. Here's some ofdoctor Hurdy's UCLA talk called Born Human How
the utterly dependents Survive. You canfind it on YouTube. The human infant
confronts all the same challenges that otherapes do, but both the mother and
her infant are going to have tofactor in this extra support from pre reproductive

(15:28):
helpers, from male helpers, whetherit's the father or whether it's this band
of bros out there showing off grandmothers. They have to factor in these extra
concerns. They are not able tocount on the four to eight years of
single minded maternal dedication that infant chimpanzeeor orangutan might. These infants were in

(15:58):
competition with the mother's older children whenthey're born and those of you who have
siblings know what that feels like.They're also in competition with their mother's alternative
reproductive possibilities. A baby that mightbe born at a better time. The
mother's mate has just left, butshe might get a new man and the

(16:19):
next baby born then. And thisleads to a very special challenge of humans
and only a very few other primatesof mother's discriminating between offspring, possibly retrenching,
and as has happened, I'm afraidall too frequently in history and prehistory

(16:41):
bailing out altogether. When she saysbailing out altogether, she means it.
There's a very dark side to femalereproductive strategy that's horrible to imagine, complete
abandonment of a baby, or eveninfanticide. Infanticide has been practiced by mothers

(17:04):
since the beginning of time. Whena mother weighs the pressures of survival with
a baby against the pressure to feedherself and keep existing siblings alive, she's
always had to make a gut wrenchingdecision, a kind of Sophie's choice,
which child will survive. Sophie's Choice, starring Meryl Streep, is a heartbreaking

(17:27):
film set in World War Two,a Nazi officer forces Streep's character to decide
which of her two young children willbe killed. All animals do it,
Some eat their young with dogs.Mothers often reject the runt of the litter.

(17:53):
In humans. There are even somecultural customs that give new mothers the
privacy to make that excruciating choice.In the Republic of Guinea Bissau in West
Africa, new mothers stay secluded insidetheir mud hut for ten days after their
baby is born. Mothers do notname their babies until they emerge. This

(18:17):
is partly because infant mortality rates areso high in that country, and anthropologists
speculate it also gives a desperate motheran opportunity to suffocate her infant. Other
examples of maternal seclusion abound. Achugamother of Uganda remains indoors with few visitors,
with her infant for three months afterbirth. When she and her baby

(18:42):
finally emerge for the first time tomake a public appearance, they do a
kind of ceremonial walk, and they'regreeted with the same song sung to warriors
returning from battle. She and herbaby have survived the weeks of danger.
Again. This is so an opportunityfor infanticide, for mothers to literally make

(19:03):
life and death decisions in private.And lest you think this practice happens only
far away from home, an FBIsupplementary homicide report shows that five hundred children
are murdered every year by a parent, and to study by the Department of
Health and Human Services reported that eachyear in the United States, more than

(19:27):
twenty two thousand mothers abandoned their babiesin hospitals, and who knows how many
are simply dumped elsewhere. I thinkif it was a Saturday morning, twenty
six year old mother of two,Joann Hauser runs out to grab milk for
that morning's breakfast, and I thoughtI heard something like a cat. A

(19:48):
closer look revealed a paper bag nextto a dumpster. I looked into this
bag and there was a baby inthe bag. A baby, astonishingly na
good with the umbilical cords still attached. The reproductive problem of infanticide or abandoned

(20:12):
babies actually has been reduced by technologyin the form of abortion. Now.
I warned you at the beginning ofthis podcast that feelings may bubble up for
you around this subject, and Iknow they're painful. Visceral feelings. Whatever
your feelings about abortion, I wantyou to know that a version of it

(20:33):
has always existed in our species aswomen made life or death decisions about survival.
Every year in the United States,more than two million women terminate pregnancies.
One in four US women will terminatea pregnancy in her lifetime. Because
we're cooperative breeders. On some unconsciouslevel, many people believe that all babies

(20:56):
belong to the village, not justthe mother. Thus, there's a stigma
around abortion, and even pro choicewomen hesitate to tell their story. Today,
there's a movement to have women comeout publicly about their abortions to help
remove some of the stigma. Ididn't feel like I should subject any of

(21:17):
the women I spoke to with thepressure to tell their story, although many
of the women we spoke with hadterminated pregnancies. Instead, I decided to
be brave and separately, with producerBrooke Peterson figuratively holding my hand by holding
my gaze, I recorded this story. I was about thirty and my mom

(21:38):
had suffered from breast cancer on andoff for like five years. She'd been
in and out of therapy, andwe kept thinking she'd do ok and not
okay. But I had this boyfriendwho, you know, it was probably
not going to amount to much.He was a lovely boyfriend and a good
friend at that time. And Iwas a news anchor. So I was

(22:00):
getting a lot of cystic acne.And I went to the doctor and they
said, well, we have thislovely drug called acutane. And they got
to say, every each individual pillin its own capsule you push out of
the little bumpy plastic thing and ithad like a Ghostbuster's thing with a big
headed, crazy looking baby on it, Like, no pregnancy, this will
create a deformed baby. And wouldn'tyou know it, while I was on

(22:25):
accutane, while my mother was dyingof breast cancer, while I had a
relationship that was probably not going tobe a future relationship, I became pregnant.
Now you can analyze all day longhow that accident happened. But when
I went to my gynecologist, shewas just like, you're never going to

(22:47):
get a doctor to bring this babyto term. First of all, the
baby's going to grow very deformed,and we don't know how much pain the
baby's going to feel inside you duringthe pregnancy. And secondly, once it's
born, it's going to die hours, days, weeks. And the worst
part for me is I wanted tolike just done with right away. She

(23:08):
said, now, listen to mecarefully. You will find a doctor who
will terminate this pregnancy earlier, butI need you to grow this baby for
ten more days. And it washard because for ten days I had to
I was so nauseous. I getsuch terrible morning sickness. And then I
got the call from my mom andall she said is I'm not well.

(23:33):
Those were the last words I heardmy mother say to me, I'm not
well. And my brother got onthe phone and said she better come home
now. They knew nothing about this, and I got on a plane and
thirty minutes after I got to mymother, holding her hand, she died.
And it was the saddest day ofmy life, you know, crying
all night because I was feeling nauseous. There was this thing growing, and

(24:00):
you know, I could hurt itby growing it more and losing my mother.
And yeah, the day after herfuneral, I flew home and I
terminated the pregnancy. But it wasa decision that I was forced to make
medically, but might have made anyway. Because at the end of the day,

(24:22):
I knew how hard motherhood would be. Today, I have two daughters,
one about to turn twenty one andgetting ready to graduate from college,
and the other about to turn sixteenand get her driver's license, with both

(24:47):
my parents having passed away long beforeI had children, and a male co
parent who wasn't really into parenting,I've been a single mother for fifteen years.
I could not have done it withoutthe help of so any allo parents.
All human parents are surrounded by cooperativebreeders, teachers, coaches, neighbors,

(25:07):
clergy doctors, other parents, teenagedbabysitters, stepparents, daycare workers,
and of course companies that pay parentsso they can feed their children. There's
a big village around most children,but that doesn't negate the feelings that sometimes
come up for allo parents. Evenfor those who have made a clear intellectual

(25:30):
decision not to reproduce, they stilloften live with some kind of cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is the act of uncomfortablyholding two opposing feelings at the same
time, the urge to reproduce andthe desire not to have children, and
it can feel very painful. Thiswoman is in her mid forties. You

(25:51):
know, I've been so borderline onthe subject forever, my entire life,
really, and and even though Ithink I will be when I'm older,
I think back, and I don'tknow what I would have done differently.
I don't feel like I made anymistakes or missteps. I've always valued my
freedom so much, and I wasnever really ready to settle down. I

(26:14):
thought of kids as claustrophobic or likethey'd suffocate me, you know, And
and I guess I needed a guyto come along to tempt me to change
that thought, but it never came. So but then, you know,
on the other side, my daddied last year, and I didn't have
kids, My brother didn't have kids, so there's no future really for our

(26:37):
family, and that really stings,you know, And it just sucks that
the family line ends on our watch. You know, we're the final generation.
And that doesn't feel good, youknow. And I wish it could
have been different somehow, but itwasn't. And this is just the way
it is. I'm sure you've heardthe saying it takes a village. Mothers

(27:02):
make sacrifices and grapple with feelings ofenvy for child free women. Child free
women sometimes wish they were mothers,but as cooperative breeders, we're all in
this together. One thing I thinkit has taught me is that all we're
not all that different from each other. When I can be in a room
with women who seem like they havetotally different experiences and walks of life,

(27:26):
their careers couldnt be more different fromwhat I do, and yet we pull
out pictures and talk about our kids, and it's like, we're all just
human beings on this journey, andthe things that we let divide us are
really insignificant. I have to admitthis wasn't an easy podcast to produce,

(27:47):
and it's probably been just as hardfor some of you to listen to the
scientific realities of human mating and reproductionaren't always rosy, and I have so
much compassion or what all women andmen go through. Though I'll add that
revealing the entire game board gives mea kind of piece. I don't know.
I see the environmental pressures on humans, whether those pressures be the difficulty

(28:10):
in finding mates, experiencing unrequited love, heartbreaking stories of children lost or children
that never came to be for somereason, It helps me to understand people
better, and as a mother oftwo healthy daughters, I spend a whole
lot of time feeling grateful for themand my Allo parents Village. I may

(28:32):
have won the Mating Lottery, butI really feel my Allo parents and won
it two. Now, when arewe going to start celebrating Allow Parents' Day?
Thanks for listening to Mating Matters.I'm doctor Wendy Walsh. Up next

(28:52):
The Price of Manhood Now pushing meninto a man box and hurt them.
Mating Matters is produced in partnership withiHeartMedia. It is researched, interviewed,
and written by me, doctor WendyWalsh, and it is edited and produced
by Brooke Peterson. You know,people don't learn about podcasts usually by just

(29:15):
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Follow us on Twitter, Facebook,YouTube and Instagram at doctor Wendy Walsh.

(29:37):
Listen to Mating Matters on the iHeartRadioapp. Or wherever you listen to your
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