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Mother's Love: Death without Weeping
NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES
Summary In this article, Nancy Scheper-Hughes argued that under conditions of extreme poverty where there are high rates of infant mortality, it is a natural human response for mothers to distance themselves emotionally from their dead and dying infants.
Scheper-Hughes based her conclusion on 25 years of fieldwork, starting in 1965, in the shantytown of Alto do Cruzeiro on the edge of Bom Jesus de Mata, a market town in northeast Brazil. Poverty in the shantytown produced a life expectancy of only 40 years, largely due to high rates of infant mortality.
Scheper-Hughes first encountered women's reactions to infant death in 1965 when 350 children died in a "great baby die-off." Mothers seemed strangely indifferent to the deaths of their children. It was then that Scheper-Hughes concluded that mothering in Alto do Cruzeiro meant learning to abstain from forming emotional ties to their infants who were sick or weakthose who were likely to die.
Social conditions were marked by brittle marriages; single parenting by women was the norm. Most had no choice but to work in the "shadow economy"; babies were frequently left home alone because infants could not be taken to work. Midwives and other women supported mothers in their detachment. Even civil authorities and the clergy discouraged the attachment of mothers to their babies. Registration of infant deaths was short and informal. Doctors did not recognize malnutrition and, instead of treating a child at risk of dying, merely tranquilized them. The church did not hold ceremonies for dead children, and infants were buried without headstones in graves that would be used over and over again.
In an epilogue added by Scheper-Hughes for this edition, the author notes that by 2008 much had changed in Bom Jesus. The advent of a democratic government brought a national health care system, a change in Catholic beliefs about infant death, an under-the-counter "morning after" pill, and most important, the installation of water pipes throughout the city. The result was a dramatic decline in both infant birth and death rates. Mothers who once were resigned to "letting go" of sickly babies now "hold on" to their infants. Unfortunately, high infant mortality has been replaced by a new form of violence: the killing of young men, by gang leaders, banditos, and local police.
In her article, "Mother's Love: Death Without Weeping," Nancy Scheper-Hughes argues that mothers in the shantytown of Alto do Cruzeiro learned to accept the death of a child without grieving.

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