The father of 5-year-old Lucio Dupuy had requested custody of the child. Not just once, but several times, and for years. The request was, as is public knowledge, rejected by Justice, for the minor to remain in charge of his mother, and her partner. After a divorce, nine out of ten tenures are awarded to the mothers. If looking at the facts is not enough, you can observe the laws: Law 26,618, on Civil Marriage, establishes that, in case of separation, “children under 5 years of age will be in charge of the mother, except for serious causes that affect the interest of the minor”. Here a debate arises, or at least some questions. First: what would be those causes that affect the interest of the minor, to what point should we go? There seems to be a void here. Secondly: why is guardianship left to the mother by default? Much has been heard about the “maternal instinct”, the need for children to be with the mother, and not necessarily with the father, the preference even of minors for their mother. The idea of this article is, through the perspective of different women, to investigate these concepts and discover if the maternal instinct is something real, biological, or rather a cultural construction.
Gestation. Opinions are mixed, of course. Disciplinary approaches condition responses. Opining from a biological perspective is not the same as from an anthropological perspective. At the time of pregnancy, the child is literally part of the woman. A study from the University of Cambridge states that during those nine months the mother and child connect at a level that the father, at least during pregnancy, cannot reach. This is so to such an extent that they demonstrated that the emotions of the woman and the child during the last months of pregnancy are connected, so that they come to affirm that they can “feel the same”.
Another article, published in the journal Science Direct, states that during pregnancy the mother’s brain “changes” in such a way that she “falls in love with the baby.” Finally, the animal nature of the human cannot be denied either. “All female mammals have maternal responses or instincts. (…) Gestational hormones prepare mothers to respond to their baby’s stimuli ”, she maintains. But she cautions that oxytocin, the famous “love hormone,” is released in moments of connection. In other words, despite the fact that the mother is nine months ahead, the father can begin to build that connection from birth, especially in a key way: by giving him the bottle.
Can. Mabel Bianco has a long career supporting and fighting for women’s rights. In 1989 she created the Foundation for the Study and Research of Women (FEIM), through which the doctor exposes and investigates, together with her team, gender inequalities. Bianco agrees on the importance of the father feeding her child in the first moments of her life: “I believe that the maternal instinct, from a biological point of view, exists, but much less than what is culturally develops. Above all, it hypertrophies towards the woman, who is the main person responsible for the care of the child. She first becomes established in the biological fact of lactation, but it continues even after that stage and the care is centralized in the woman. For this reason, for example, the importance of men giving her a bottle. They don’t give the breast, but they can give the food: there is the transmission of all the affection that the baby receives. And that is cultural, it is not biological”.
“Animals –adds Bianco– also have this sense of paternal or maternal care, but much less developed, because of the culture that is added in the case of human beings with the dependence on the mother for care. I think that women before, when the imbalance in couples was very unequal, although now there are couples who are still very unbalanced, we retained being the center of care as a way of having some kind of power over the man, who decides everything: what you eat, where you live, what you do. All. To the extent that this decision-making power is more shared, the use by women of the child as one’s possession is less, compared to taking the weight off the male”.
“That is why I think it is something cultural and that it is something that we have to start thinking about to what extent this is transmitted in the informal education that is received at home, and in society, to men and women. That is to say: women do not have to be guilty because we go out to work and leave the child or baby in the care of another person. Whether it’s a boy or a girl, that doesn’t matter. But it is also interesting that we, women and men, share that care. Today I was speaking with a Colombian woman who works at the United Nations, married to a Finn, they have a child, and she said that her husband is not working at the moment and takes care of the child and running the house. It’s an arrangement in which he doesn’t feel shortchanged and she doesn’t feel bad either. It is a way of sharing responsibilities. In other countries, such as Finland, they are more used to these arrangements than in Latin American countries, where care is still concentrated on the mother,” the doctor concludes.
Invention. Anthropologist Sabina Frederic was Minister of Security between 2019 and 2021. During her administration, she headed the 12th Meeting of the Federal Board of Security, Gender and Diversity and opines from her matter of knowledge: “From the anthropological point of view there is no There is the maternal instinct. Neither from a psychoanalytic point of view. No social, cultural or scientific study would affirm something like that. The roles are exchanged; in some cultures men have a more sentimental than normative role. There are women who do not want to be mothers and see it as an imposition. And males in homosexual couples raising children. Families in which someone other than the biological mother performs the maternal role. Children raised by grandparents. The maternal instinct does not exist, it is an invention of the patriarchy to enslave women.
However, despite her statement, she delves into the roles of fathers and mothers: “The child needs someone to fulfill the maternal role. But the maternal role can be fulfilled by someone else. In my case, my great-grandmother was delivered to Casa Cuna in 1900 and was nursed by a milk mother and raised by a woman who was not her biological mother. There are many such stories. Not to mention the women who adopt. Normally it is women who adopt this role, but not necessarily by biological instinct. For Freud or Lacan, the maternal role has more to do with care, affectivity, intimacy, and nutrition. Early sociability. The paternal function has to do with the normative, the protection. Mothers can fulfill both roles, and these functions are biological and cultural. The human psyche, for its development, needs these basic functions: from the non-biological side, but symbolic. It does not have its origin in chemical reactions, but in language and words”.
“In general –adds Frederic–, women take that place not only out of desire, but also because there is an apprenticeship in the role. Mothers are not victims. They are builders of that place that demands them. They become necessary. They are skills that they develop and that men hand over, with costs. The division of parenting labor is culturally normative. Mom and dad don’t read a manual, it’s embodied. It is difficult to find a couple where the functions are divided half and half. The woman is in the daily register: what time she wakes up, if she ate or not, how school is going. The few days that there are in Argentina of paternity leave kill her function; the possibility of learning to care is prohibited. The State is a great computer of this removal of the male from the upbringing, and Justice too. Not to mention Lucio Dupuy. The biological mother appears as sovereign, and the idea of the maternal instinct is that of the mother’s sovereignty over the child. In some cases, the mother appropriates the place and displaces the man, denying her paternal role. There are countries, such as Sweden, where, during the first eight years of a child’s life, both the mother and the father are entitled to one year’s leave. That is a way of taking turns in care ”, he relates.
maternity Dora Barrancos is one of the great references of Argentine feminism and has no hesitation in rejecting the idea of a maternal instinct, which escapes the cultural, but warns that it is a construction that has been developed over the centuries.
“Definitely, exhaustively, there is no maternal instinct. There is a notable, perhaps extraordinary creation of hominid acculturation that refers to the degree that is lavished on our offspring. But not as an instinct. Above all because motherhood became a circumstance of sophistication, very attached to the idea of children’s rights. And it is evident that there are a large number of historiographical studies that show how the maternal attitude, maternal feelings, which are feelings constituted over time, have changed”, explains the author of Mujeres, entre la casa y la plaza.
“Far away,” he explains, “when in the passage from the Paleo to the Neolithic our condition as hominids, as Homo sapiens sapiens, is already very evident, when we are the species we are today, the number of pregnancies was enormous, almost without solution of continuity and, of course, the death toll before the year was tremendous. I always invite you to think about the enormous number of births that our predecessors had in the Upper Neolithic and the very slim chance of survival of the creatures.
So, Barrancos wonders, “how can we think that the maternal feelings of that moment were the same ones that we have constituted in the long civilizing passage?”
“That is why –he details–, the phenomenon of maternal instinct does not exist. What exists is a refined construction of feelings of a symbolic order, of sensitivities that have constituted us as mothers. And I can’t stop thinking about the order of rights that were enshrined for children, which obviously have a fundamental impact on the responsibility of motherhood. In short, being a mother is an extraordinary socio-historical construction”.
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