Mrs May’s war on motherhood
by Kathy Gyngell, The Conservative Woman:
Fathers must share caring more fairly, exhorted Mrs May this weekend with quite astonishing hubris. What’s more, she seems prepared to enforce it.
From the publication of her spurious national gender pay gap review, it’s taken her a week to deliver a no doubt preconceived solution.
It is exactly as I predicted when the results of this phoney exercise hit the headlines.
[…] Mrs May could not devalue motherhood more. Saying it is transferable and replaceable by the father is to deny, as radical feminists always have, the baby’s unique need for its mother and the mother’s unique ability to meet that need. A mother is not replaceable to a baby. Breastfeeding is the most obvious expression of this. A baby’s cries on being parted from his mother (until resignation sets in) tell their own story. So too does a mother’s pain and palpable discomfort at being parted from her baby too soon or for too long. These are biological mechanisms designed to protect offspring which our feminist society perversely urges mothers to ignore.
A baby’s distress when dropped off at daycare is not just the subjective view of an over-emotional mum. It is the dispassionate conclusion from observing babies separated from their mothers in clinical as well as social settings, first documented by psychologist John Bowlby in 1951. The anxiety and distress caused either by physical maternal deprivation or the mother’s failure to bond formed the basis of his seminal attachment theory, a case of science mirroring common sense.
Much as feminists have tried to deny it and to discredit Bowlby to justify a brave new daycare world designed to ‘free’ mums from the tyranny of childcare so that they can work, they have failed.
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