In her new book “Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct,” author Abigail Tucker argues that maternal instinct can be measured in a lab.
“I had never thought of maternal behavior, maternal instinct, as something you could study under a microscope,” Tucker told CNA in an interview. However, she said that a trip to Emory University and a study of rodents made her consider the distinctiveness of a mother’s brain.
“We are just beginning to understand what makes moms moms,” Tucker said. “And that’s to the detriment of the human species.”
Weaving her own experience as a mother with an examination of the ways motherhood changes body and mind, Tucker’s book explores the biology of motherhood.
Tucker said that while most of her career was spent writing about animals, one area of expertise she could contribute to was her own experience having four children.
“By repeating the experience four times, I was able to see some of the hidden forces and wild card factors that were shaping me,” she said.
Maternal instinct, she told CNA, is really a “change in motive.” She noted that some of these changes are physical. The brain, for example, is “a very key organ of childbirth,” she said.
“Maternal instinct is really the awakening of this core, pro-baby motive, it’s a sensitization to infant cues and a desire to respond to them,” Tucker said. “One scientist called it an ‘unmasking of a latent identity.’”
A host of variables – financial, social, stress, partner and familiar relationships – also contribute to the type of mother a woman becomes, Tucker said.
“As mothers, we make babies, but we are also being made,” Tucker said. “What are the forces that are invisibly working on us that help account for this staggering variation you see in maternal variation, just in one American city or one American block?”
Tucker said that humans are “notable” among mammals in that they do not have what scientists call “fixed action patterns” with motherhood – patterns that other species have.
“There’s so much variation in the way moms do their jobs globally, it’s hard to pinpoint one thing we uniformly do,” she said, adding that scientists have noticed that many human mothers have a “left-sided cradling bias” – meaning they are more likely to cradle an infant on their left side.
Tucker said she hopes the fact that birth rates are currently in “a swan dive” will prompt increased scientific study of maternal health and science, so that mothers, babies, families, and society can all thrive.
“At a moment where moms are becoming a bit more of a scarcity than they were before, it might be worth kind of weighing some of these things we can do to help moms be at peak performance, because that’s good for everyone,” she said.
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Nebraska Capitol. / Credit: Steven Frame/Shutterstock
CNA Staff, Nov 1, 2024 / 14:55 pm (CNA).
Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has released an advisory clarifying that the state’s preborn protection law does not prohibit miscarriage care or lifesaving care amid a pro-abortion advertisement campaign that told the public otherwise.
“The Department of Health and Human Services has received several inquiries, from physicians and health care providers, expressing concern regarding recent radio and television ads that included incorrect and misleading information regarding the Preborn Child Protection Act,” the Oct. 28 advisory reads.
The health advisory came amid an advertising campaign by advocates of Nebraska’s Right to Abortion Initiative 439, which advocates for a right to abortion up to fetal viability in the state constitution. The campaign featured multiple ads that stated that women couldn’t receive miscarriage care and necessary health care because of Nebraska’s current law.
“Any time misleading information causes confusion among health care professionals, it could cause harm to the health and well-being of their patients,” stated the advisory by Dr. Timothy Tesmer, the chief medical officer of the DHHS in Nebraska.
In the health advisory, Tesmer didn’t name which ads the department was responding to, but he clarified that the current law, which protects unborn children after 12 weeks’ gestational age from abortion, provides exceptions for medical emergencies and for cases of rape or incest.
But an advertisement campaign by pro-abortion group Protect Our Rights: Nebraska for 439 told the public otherwise. In one advertisement, advocates said that in Nebraska, there is “an abortion ban that threatens women’s lives” and that “doctors can’t help them even if the pregnancy won’t survive. It puts their lives in danger.” Other advertisements by the same group state that doctors “can’t properly care for patients” and claim that women get sent home “because of the confusing abortion ban” when they have miscarriages.
Allie Berry, the campaign manager for Protect Our Rights, told NBC News that she believed the advisory referred to her group’s ads but said the advisory was designed to “confuse voters.”
The advisory noted that a medical emergency is legally defined as either a threat to the pregnant woman’s life or a “serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”
“The act does not require a medical emergency to be immediate,” Tesmer noted in the advisory. “Physicians understand that it is difficult to predict with certainty whether a situation will cause a patient to become seriously ill or die, but physicians do know what situations could lead to serious outcomes.”
Nebraska also has a competing pro-life amendment, Initiative 434, which would prohibit abortions after the first trimester, with exceptions for medical emergencies and cases of rape or incest. Another advertisement by Protect Our Rights claimed that Initiative 434 would make Nebraska’s current law permanent and “opens the door” to banning miscarriage care and IVF.
The health advisory clarified that a variety of medical treatments are not prohibited by the Preborn Child Protection Act, including the removal of a child’s remains after pregnancy loss and the termination of a preborn child produced by in vitro fertilization (IVF) but not implanted in the mother’s womb. The advisory noted that any act intended to save the child’s life, as well as treatment for ectopic pregnancies, is not prohibited under the current law.
“Physicians should exercise their best clinical judgment, and the law allows intervention consistent with prevailing standards of care,” the advisory continued. “The law is deferential to a physician’s judgment in these circumstances.”
Political context
With two contradicting abortion-related measures on the 2024 ballot, Nebraskans will decide Nov. 5 on protection for unborn children in the nation’s only competing abortion ballots.
Marion Miner, the associate director of Pro-life and Family Policy for the Nebraska Catholic Conference, told CNA that “these lies … are abortion activists’ attempt to terrify voters into approving a radical pro-abortion constitutional amendment they would never otherwise support.”
“Abortion activists are putting women’s lives at risk in a gambit to advance a pro-abortion political agenda,” Miner added. “There are real potential human costs, including lost lives.”
She noted that “misinformation by abortion activists …is putting women’s lives at risk.”
“These lies have become so rampant in the weeks leading up to this election that public health officials felt the need to correct the record to prevent this misinformation from provoking a public health crisis,” Miner said.
Kelsey Pritchard, director of state public affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, pointed out that this pro-abortion rhetoric is not isolated to Nebraska.
“This falsity that has been parroted by [Vice President] Kamala Harris and unchecked by most of the media leads women to delay seeking care and gives doctors pause when they need to act immediately,” Pritchard said in a statement shared with CNA.
“This falsity that has been parroted by Kamala Harris and unchecked by most of the media leads women to delay seeking care and gives doctors pause when they need to act immediately,” said Kelsey Pritchard, director of state public affairs at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. Credit: EWTN News/Screenshot
“Every state with a pro-life law, including Nebraska, protects women who experience a miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, or any other medical emergency in pregnancy,” Pritchard emphasized. “This care continues to be available under ‘life of the mother’ exceptions, which allow physicians to rely upon their reasonable medical judgment.”
Recently, Harris amplified claims by several news outlets that two women died as the result of Georgia’s pro-life laws. But doctors say one woman, Amber Thurman, died because of the abortion pill and medical malpractice, while the other woman, Candi Miller, died of side effects from the abortion pill after she didn’t seek medical help.
“Women who need medical care should not be made to believe, because of ads they have seen on TV or in political mailers, that they have no option but to stay home instead of seeking treatment,” Miner said.
Bishop Mark Brennan of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia. / Credit: Archdiocese of Baltimore
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 7, 2025 / 14:33 pm (CNA).
As officials carry out mass deportations across the United States, Bishop Mark Brennan of Whe… […]
Los Angeles, Calif., Feb 12, 2020 / 10:15 am (CNA).- Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles commented Wednesday on Querida Amazonia, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation following the Amazon synod, emphasizing its reminder that that Church proclaims Christ.
“Today our Holy Father Pope Francis offers us a hopeful and challenging vision of the future of the Amazon region, one of the earth’s most sensitive and crucial ecosystems, and home to a rich diversity of cultures and peoples,” the president of the US bishops’ conference said Feb. 12.
“The Pope reminds us that the Church serves humanity by proclaiming Jesus Christ and his Gospel of love, and he calls for an evangelization that respects the identities and histories of the Amazonian peoples and that is open to the ‘novelty of the Spirit, who is always able to create something new with the inexhaustible riches of Jesus Christ.’”
Francis “also calls all of us in the Americas and throughout the West to examine our ‘style of life’ and to reflect on the consequences that our decisions have for the environment and for the poor,” Archbishop Gomez noted.
“Along with my brother bishops here in the United States, I am grateful for the Holy Father’s wisdom and guidance and we pledge our continued commitment to evangelizing and building a world that is more just and fraternal and that respects the integrity of God’s creation.”
Despite widespread speculation, the apostolic exhortation does not call for the priestly ordination of married men, but seeks to expand “horizons beyond conflicts.”
The document presents the pope’s “four great dreams” for the Pan-Amazonian region’s ecological preservation and “Amazonian holiness.”
The exhortation does not quote from recommendations made by bishops at the Vatican’s October meeting on the Amazon. Instead, Pope Francis “officially present[s]” the synod’s final document alongside his exhortation, asking “everyone to read it in full.”
Nearly half of Querida Amazonia is dedicated to outlining the Roman Pontiff’s “Ecclesial Dream” for the Amazon region, in which Pope Francis stresses the singular role of the priest, while affirming the laity’s ongoing contributions to evangelization.
“No Christian community is built up which does not grow from and hinge on the celebration of the most holy Eucharist … This urgent need leads me to urge all bishops, especially those in Latin America, not only to promote prayer for priestly vocations, but also to be more generous in encouraging those who display a missionary vocation to opt for the Amazon region,” Pope Francis wrote.
The exhortation warns against an outlook that restricts “our understanding of the Church to her functional structures.” It also rejects a narrow vision of “conceptions of power in the Church” that “clericalize women.”
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