BABIES (Part One)

realistic babydoll

I was given my last doll just before high school (1953) and was told I was really too old for it.  I guess they meant I was ready for real babies, but I wasn’t.  Maybe I was covering up for the endless sexy paperdolls I drew with their fabulous gowns and intense romantic lives.  (That was before “Sex and the City” -- it was before we even had a television set.  It was much influenced by the comic strip, Brenda Starr, Reporter.) 

The doll was one of the first crying babies, not the usual sweet bland round idealized baby.  Why were these rather nasty baby dolls appearing?  Maybe we were all wanting to think about reality.  It was the end of the baby boom.  Now we knew what it meant to welcome home the soldiers and gift them with children.

In the 19^th century and earlier, childbirth killed women and babies.  It was before simple sanitation, so docs and midwives were infectious, and before anesthesia, so childbirth could be agony.  Caesarian sections were problematic or impossible, so -- like calves -- sometimes dead or not dead babies had to be extracted in pieces to save the mother.  None of the management meds had been developed and I’m including birth control pills in that.  Sometimes it took three or four wives to get all the children raised -- men couldn’t do it alone with the farmstead workload of the times.  In France, they say, the advent of dependable birth control meant that professional extramarital sex profits declined because it was no longer a necessary way of sparing one’s wife from the burden of pregnancy.  “Even with the help of modern medicine, pregnancy still kills about 800 women every day worldwide.”  (From the article quoted below.)

Dead baby, angelized

To keep women from flocking to convents, public culture in Victorian bourgeois circles made motherhood into a shrine and babies into sacred objects.  That lingers on in the anti-abortion movement, a denial of the real muck and pain (and cost) of babies.  Now a new set of medical studies has revealed a war unsuspected even by the Madonna worshipers: the molecular tug of war in the uterus from the moment the ovum is inseminated.  It’s all just organic chemistry, of course, but the least bit of personification and it becomes rather terrifying.

Some quotes -- a LOT of quotes -- from “War in the Womb” by Suzanne Sadedin, published in Aeon:

“The cells of the human endometrium are tightly aligned, creating a fortress-like wall around the inside of the uterus. That barrier is packed with lethal immune cells. As far back as 1903, researchers observed embryos ‘invading’ and ‘digesting’ their way into the uterine lining. In 1914, R W Johnstone described the implantation zone as ‘the fighting line where the conflict between the maternal cells and the invading trophoderm takes place’. It was a battlefield ‘strewn with... the dead on both sides’.”  So much for poetic images of the baby embraced by the uterus, but it isn’t a baby yet, is it?

It’s about genomic imprinting which is about the war between the two sides of those complicated and war-like little helixes of code. “Normal development can proceed only as long as both parental genotypes are correctly balanced against one another. Just as in a tug-of-war, if one party drops its end, both fall over. . . Primate embryos can sometimes implant in the Fallopian tube instead of the womb. When that happens, they tunnel ferociously towards the richest nutrient source they can find; the result is often a bloodbath.” 

“In all, about 15 per cent of women suffer life-threatening complications during each pregnancy. Without medical assistance, more than 40 per cent of hunter-gatherer women never reach menopause.”

“Cells from the invading placenta digest their way through the endometrial surface, puncturing the mother’s arteries, swarming inside and remodeling them to suit the foetus.” 

“Should the embryo fail to convince its mother that it is a perfectly normal, healthy individual, it will be summarily expelled. . .How does an embryo convince its mother that it is healthy? By honestly displaying its vigour and lust for life, which is to say, by striving with all its strength to implant. And how does the mother test the embryo? By making the embryo’s task incredibly difficult. Just as the placenta has evolved to be aggressive and invasive, the endometrium has evolved to be tough and hostile. For humans, the result is that half of all human pregnancies fail.”

Embryo in fallopian tube

“Once the embryo implants, it gets full access to her tissues. This asymmetry means two things. Firstly, the mother can no longer control the nutrient supply she offers the foetus – not without reducing the nutrient supply to her own tissues. Is this unfettered access to maternal blood the key to the extraordinary brain development we see in young primates? Fascinatingly, the intensity of the invasion does seem to correlate with brain development.”

“The second major consequence of the foetus’s direct access to maternal nutrients is that the foetus can also release its own hormones into the mother’s bloodstream, and thus manipulate her. And so it does.”

. . .”By looking for signs of genomic imprinting – that is, genes that are expressed differently depending on whether they are inherited from the father or the mother – researchers have been able to pin down the genetic causes of numerous diseases of pregnancy and childhoods. Genomic imprinting, and the maternal-fetal battle behind it, have been shown to account for gestational diabetes, Prader-Willi Syndrome, Angelman Syndrome, childhood obesity and several cancers. Researchers suspect that it may also underlie devastating psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism. In 2000, Ian Morison and colleagues compiled a database of more than 40 imprinted genes. That number had doubled by 2005; by 2010, it had nearly doubled again. Identifying genetic mechanisms does not in itself provide a cure for these complex diseases, but it is a vital step towards one.”

All this molecular struggle in the blood stream of an impregnated woman whose uterine lining has become a battlefield cannot help but be reflected in her emotional state, no matter how rational and informed about it she may be.  Even knowing what happens is not much help.   So the culture tries to help by providing images and ideas about the holiness of motherhood, the ideal of the Madonna who can remain serene even when loaded onto a donkey and packed off to Bethlehem to have a baby in a stable with the other mammals.  No midwife but a sheep and some shepherds -- not that they wouldn’t know what to do.

But these super-loaded images celebrating babies can deceive adolescents and confuse them about sex.  The girls begin to crave babies, esp. if they think of them as bonding gifts to a providing and protective man or as a chance to engage in love with another tiny being -- both giver and the receiver warmed and luminous.  Men can feel this pull as well.  Hopefully, they will be responsible men who will form a three-way, a domestic Trinity.

ultra-real babydoll, anatomically correct

But as I thought about it, I began to suspect how some males -- confusing love with sex, as usual -- can want to make love to the baby or toddler.  If they then define sex as reassurance, cuddling, responsiveness, respecting the humanity of the other, that’s one thing.  Maybe that can become protective love.  If they define sex as domination, control, and the right to humiliate, defile and torture another human being, those men are deadly weapons.  And some women, desperate for that male, might allow even torture of their own child.  Their definition of sex, from their own experience, might also be predatory.

For both, the advantage of the large hominid brain earned with chemical warfare in the womb, just doesn’t exist.  They are not thinking.  Fortunately, many of the rest of us are.  The question is what we think we’re doing about it.  I think “not enough.”  The crying baby is not a doll.  Carrying it away to social agencies is not enough.  They are not paperdolls, to be filed.