Bitch: On the Female of the Species

by Lucy Cooke

Infanticide is strictly pathological in humans. We are part of the 40 per cent of mammal species that have evolved alternative strategies that eliminate the need for such a blunt survival tool. Nevertheless the same urocortin neurons still exist in the hypothalamus of humans. They’re not used, but Dulac believes they have been conserved because they’ve been so important in evolutionary history. If Dulac is right about the link between these urocortin neurons and postpartum depression, she hopes that her work can help identify drugs that could act as blockers to treat such disorders. ‘If you listen to the testimony of women who’ve killed their children, they don’t know what prompted them to do it, but they had this enormous instinct to do what they did and they have no explanation for it. You can imagine that this might be very similar to what’s happening in the brain of a mouse surrounded by danger and instinctively deciding to eliminate an infant.’