The new science of motherhood shows it’s far more transformative than western culture allows | Lucy Jones | The Guardian

During pregnancy, cells are exchanged between the mother and foetus via the placenta. These fetal cells have been found to remain in multiple areas of the maternal body – organs and tissues including the liver, heart, brain, lungs and blood – and crucially in areas of disease and damage. Some studies point to a potentially benevolent role in repair – the presence of fetal cells in healed caesarean section wounds suggest they are beneficial. But they’re also found at sites of disease, and may play a detrimental role in maternal health, for example in the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases and pre-eclampsia.

Certainly, this transfer of cells has profound implications for maternal biology and health. It also troubles the philosophical idea of us as self-contained individuals. The intricate exchange creates what the geneticist Dr Diana Bianchi has called a “permanent connection which contributes to the survival of both individuals”.

The new science of pregnancy and motherhood is showing us just how dramatic the hormonal fluctuations are, as well as how seismic the cardiac, immunological, haematological, renal and respiratory changes – and their lifelong impacts on the body.

Did you know that if you have been pregnant and given birth, your brain will have changed shape in multiple areas? Changed actual shape?

In a landmark study published in Nature Neuroscience in 2017, researchers led by Elseline Hoekzema, a neuroscientist from the Netherlands, and Erika Barba-Müller, a neuroscientist working in Spain, provided evidence for the first time that pregnancy renders pronounced, consistent changes in brain structure.

This synaptic reorganisation and fine-tuning, it is thought, make the brain more efficient and streamlined in what it needs to do to care for a baby. Or as the neuroscientist Jodi Pawluski puts it, “to make sure we, and our child, survive parenthood”.

The new science of motherhood shows us what many feel: that becoming a mother is more of a big deal than western society allows.

The word that changed everything for me was “matrescence”. It means the process of becoming a mother and it’s a concept that exists in most societies on Earth, with special rites and rituals to hold and support the new mother. The neglect of this transition in western societies has devastating consequences but, in its illumination, critical social possibilities.

Source: The new science of motherhood shows it’s far more transformative than western culture allows | Lucy Jones | The Guardian