The bitch is a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Nyoka, Swahili for "snake." She is a handsome chocolate animal big enough to hunt down a wildebeest. Her owner bred her, and she whelped 16 pups. Several died at birth. There was one runt, a tiny, perfectly formed female. No matter how many times Nyoka's owner put the runt to the teat, when she came back later she found the pup pushed away, as if an imaginary circle surrounded the mother and her marginal offspring had not been permitted inside. "Ah," thought the owner, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, "yet another example of maternal instinct." Motherhood has been of consuming interest to Hrdy (rhymes with birdie) for years now. Her theories about why mothers—as well as fathers—behave as they do brought her scorn, and then respect, as one of the most radical evolutionary thinkers of our day. In her most recent book, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, she demonstrated that mothers may abort, abandon, or even kill offspring they do not have the resources to rear. Her assertion that infanticide is common to species across the animal kingdom shook biology, especially when she applied her theories to Homo sapiens. Her feminist reinterpretation of evolutionary theory, as well as data, challenges the archetype of "the good mother," a natural Madonna, and replaces her with a more complex female figure—ambitious, calculating, nurturing, selfish, loving, sexually assertive. The Ridgeback's behavior, which saddened Hrdy, "was a kind of confirmation," she says.
Six feet tall and rangy, with a big Texas smile, Hrdy, 56, doesn't look like a radical who wants to upset the mom-and-apple-pie order of our cultural norms and public policies. Yet her contention, backed up by research, that motherhood is a burden seldom embraced unconditionally has profound implications. Her message is clear: Many women with no access to support systems will choose abortion over a marginal existence and penury.
Hrdy maintains that a human infant is so costly to raise—requiring 13 million calories to attain adulthood—that mothers since the Pleistocene Epoch have made calculated decisions about when, how, and whether to rear them.
That rare scientist who is willing to use her own life as an object of research, she openly discusses how ambivalent she was 25 years ago when "I found myself torn between my work and an admittedly adorable but insatiably demanding human baby." She points out that today—when for the first time in the history of the human species, females have a choice about conceiving children—birthrates are plummeting not just in Europe and the United States but also in less developed nations like India and Brazil. "Women are voting with their ovaries," she says, "opting to delay births, to have only one or two children, or none at all."
