La Vie Childfree

One Response to “Taking On the ‘Biological Urge’ On HuffPo” Add your own

• Scott said:
  August 13th, 2012 at 2:57 am

  First of all, if there is such an urge, it is clearly not universal. There are “otherwise normal,” healthy people who do not experience a biological urge to have children. There are even people who are quite naturally of an extremely low or nonexistent sex drive, so it’s not so surprising that there would also be people lacking other supposedly universal imperatives. Even people who feel a hardwired urge to have a baby may not get the rush of oxytocin when they deliver. The worst cosmic joke of all is that there are women who originally felt an urge to have children but then loathe being a mother with every fibre of their being once the child is born. Good job, Mother Nature!

  Secondly, there is the question of whether we should indulge in every biological urge when we feel it. Most sane people would say no. Even if one could prove that wanting a baby is “just biology talking,” that doesn’t mean we simply give in to it mindlessly. We have lots of “biological urges” that we ignore, channel, or moderate on a daily basis. I would be fired, possibly arrested, for paying too much attention to all the random “biological” impulses I might have during a board meeting. (I’ll keep it PG and say, for an example, eating up all the donuts. If you’d like an example with more adult ratings, use your imagination.)

  Finally, I notice that a lot of people are very SELECTIVE about which biochemical events they consider “natural” and which others they simply ignore. The brain chemistry of post-partum depression still needs more careful study, but it’s pretty clear that it is a fairly common biological brain event. I don’t hear a lot of biological determinists embracing PPD as a natural thing that women are supposed to experience, but they would if they were consistent in their worldview. Funny how the biological explanations for human behavior ONLY support pronatalism.

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