Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

by Angela Saini

The maternal instinct in humans is not an automatic switch, which is flicked on the moment a baby is born. This is Sarah Hrdy’s radical proposition. All over the world, mothers are known to admit that it takes time for them to fall in love with their babies, while some never do. In some unfortunate cases, mothers deliberately neglect and even kill their newborns. This may seem utterly unnatural. After all, we assume the maternal instinct is as strong and immediate in humans as it is in any other creature. It’s considered a fundamental part of being a woman. So much so that those who don’t want children or reject their own are sometimes considered odd. But the reality, observes Hrdy, is that it’s more common for mothers not to form an immediate attachment to their offspring than we like to believe.