By DONALD DeMARCO
Bonding between human beings, despite its great value, has been under attack in recent years. Bruce Feinstein’s book, Real Men Don’t Bond, may be dismissed as an expression of male bravado. We know that Agent 007, whose cinematic exploits have been viewed by more than a billion viewers worldwide, could do virtually everything except what his name signifies, namely, bond. On a more scientific level, one specialist in child development has argued that “mother-infant-bonding” may actually be a form of opiate addiction. Diane Eyer’s book, Mother-Infant Bonding: A Scientific Fiction, may go even further in denying the reality of bonding.
A reviewer for The New York Times praised the book for puncturing the hyper-inflated mystique of mother-infant bonding concocted by those alleged experts on motherhood who do not know the difference between science and wishful thinking.
Mothers of the world may object since the experience of motherhood gives them a more immediate, complete, and human experience of motherhood. Mothers experience motherhood from the inside, whereas science observes motherhood from the outside. Experience and observation represent two different perspectives. With regard to motherhood, mothers have the ringside seat.
In the October 7 vice-presidential debate, Kamala Harris added to the attack against bonding when she stated that the unborn child is part of the woman’s body. This has been a position commonly proffered by pro-abortionists in defense of the alleged autonomy of the pregnant mother. The fact that it is reiterated by a vice-presidential candidate gives it an authority and influence that is wholly unwarranted.
According to a Russian proverb, a lie can get around the world faster that the truth can gets its boots on. After Canadian psychiatrist Tom Verny published The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, he was literally shunned by the medical community. His peers regarded him as a pariah for defending the politically incorrect notion that bonding takes place between a mother and her unborn child.
The denial of bonding is an example of using an ideology to displace a reality. An ideology is a dream world in which no one is either inconvenienced or offended. Reality comes with difficulties and duties. Bonding is a reality and its denial is the denial of a bounty of benefits without which human life would, indeed, be impoverished.
When we eat, we assimilate food into our body. Fully digested food becomes part of the body.
Assimilation, on the other hand, is radically different from bonding. With bonding, mutual and reciprocal benefits are conferred upon both parties without either losing its identity. And this is the key to the importance of bonding. Like mercy, as Shakespeare states in The Merchant of Venice, it is twice blessed, benefiting both the giver and the receiver.
There are three major forms of biochemical bonding: sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and lactation. In the first kind, concerning the man and woman (I would prefer to say husband and wife), hormones pass from the woman to the man as well as from the man to the woman thereby assisting in the bonding. One reason that many physicians oppose contraception is that it compromises this two-in-one flesh physiological bonding.
Pregnancy provides the second form of biochemical bonding. Pediatricians talk about the powerful feeling of attachment or closeness that a pregnant woman has toward her unborn child. She bonds with her child while she anticipates his birth.
Lactation is the third form of biochemical bonding, between the nursing mother and her infant. This form of bonding is so well established that the sound of the child crying in the nursery can awaken the mother by triggering the release of oxytocin and prolactin. These bio-chemicals assist in extending and fulfilling the bonding between mother and child.
What science tells us concerning biochemical bonding together with what people know through experience and intuition, is that human beings are capable of bonding with each other: husband and wife, pregnant mother and unborn child, mother and neonate. This bonding is neither assimilation (loss of identity), bondage (enslavement), nor indifference (alienation).
Bonding confers mutual benefits. It is a two-way street, so to speak, in which reciprocal benefits are delivered to both parties. Biochemical bonding, in the three senses we have outlined, sends the message that we human beings are made for each other, that love, rather than alienation, characterizes us in our essential nature. The Georgian language provides a beautiful description of the fact that the unborn child is not part of the woman’s body. In the language of this former Soviet republic, one does not say “you are pregnant,” but “you have two souls.” The Georgian word, orsuli is composed of the words ori (two) + suli (soul).
Science does acknowledge chemistry, and therefore, the biochemicals that go into bonding. After all, we are bodily creatures. This highest, as C.S. Lewis has pointed out, does not stand without the lowest. Empirical science does not explain the whole picture, which includes acceptance, love, satisfaction, commitment, and joy. It describes the basement, so to speak, but not the entire edifice. To reduce the person to chemicals is to lose sight of the person. Bonding is between persons.
It is demeaning to pregnant women to argue that their relationship with their unborn child is a not a form of bonding that attests to their dignity and their God-given capacity for sympathetic bonding, nurturing, and protecting human beings at the most vulnerable stage of their lives. The bond of matrimony should be the prototype that sets in motion other forms of bonding that prepare individuals for the joys of peace and brotherhood.
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