The changes the pregnant brain undergoes have been underestimated, Hoekzema told me, “as hormones and their impact often are, and thought of as something akin to an extreme menstrual period, while this is of course on a completely different scale.” It is likely the most drastic endocrine event in human life. But people think of new motherhood as

The way we approach reproductive labor—the way we treat mothering bodies and minds—is similar to the way we destroy the living world, habitats, human life, and health and well-being, in the fetish for growth at any cost. We do it all in the service of an extractivist capitalism which uses and exploits “public goods”—human and nonhuman life, in

The presence of fetal cells in healed Cesarean section wounds suggests they could migrate to the site of damage to help in repair. But they’re also found at sites of disease, which could suggest they may have detrimental roles.

One evening, at the Mothers Talking group, I surprised myself by bursting out in frustration: “So at the time women are most likely to suffer from mental illness we isolate them inside, expect them to match unrealistic human ideals, judge their every move, demand they get their body back after the violence of birth, silence their lived experience,

Hoekzema’s study—of women before conception, through pregnancy and in the postpartum period—found that significant changes in the brain happened in the Default Mode Network (DMN), an area associated with processes like the perception of the self, self-referential processing, self-related mental explorations and autobiographical memory. The observed

Perhaps the cultural obsession with “natural” birth reflects the extent of our detachment from our bodies and from the Earth. We are so disconnected from the rest of the natural world that we don’t know what “nature” is: bodies failing, cuckoos pushing eggs out of nests, a weirdly small human pelvis and a big infant head, illness and disease, shit

“Insipid/idealistic portrayals of motherhood made me less interested in it as a young person. I thought it was boring when it’s one of the most extreme socio-political experiences I have ever been through.”

As I tried to reorient myself, I realized how much of my angst had emanated from an existential crisis. Not in the clichéd sense that I couldn’t find meaning in my life; rather, that the weight of my choices and responsibilities, combined with a new, sustained confrontation with mortality, was bamboozling. This was a world tilted.

the science of the maternal brain published to date tells us that mothers in this vulnerable period need care, and particularly protective social policies. The one strategy which seems to inoculate most new mothers against mental illness is social support. Social support, according to scientific tools and scales, includes emotional and practical