Free Republic

On Oct. 29, 2022, Whitney Reising Oliver died. She was 22 weeks pregnant with her first child, a little boy she and her husband had named Felix. Their unborn son also died. “Whit was so excited to be a mother and raise baby Felix in Chicago, IL—the city she loved, alive with her favorite art, culture, music, and food—and the city she called home for the past 17 years,” her obituary read. Oliver worked with artists with developmental disabilities and loved hiking, cooking, and cuddling her cocker spaniel Magic. Unexpected, age-inappropriate death of otherwise healthy people is always shocking. But...

Like so many women in this country, Chelsea Conaboy went back to work shortly after having her first baby. She sat in a makeshift closet, trying to pump breast milk, and wondered when the magical “maternal instinct” she’d heard so much about would kick in.

A study provides a window into the first 100,000 years of the history of modern humans. The real Garden Of Eden has been traced to the African nation of Botswana, according to a major study of DNA. Scientists believe our ancestral homeland is south of the Zambezi River in the country's north. The conclusion comes after the study of maternal genetic lineage of anatomically modern humans, finding it was closest to those living in the area, which includes northern Botswana, Namibia to the west and Zimbabwe to the east. For 70,000 years, our ancestors thrived in the area before changes...

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan, May 8, 2009 – The young Dari interpreter standing by the desk translates the words of the American doctor to the young woman, as she sits quietly. An examining table stands against one yellow wall in the small room. Various tools and medical equipment are positioned around the room. Army Col. (Dr.) Kathryn Hall-Boyer, the Joint Sustainment Command Afghanistan surgeon, examines a girl’s ear for infection at the women’s clinic at the Afghan National Army Kandahar Regional Hospital in Afghanistan, April 21, 2009. U.S. Army photo by Pfc. Elisebet Freeburg  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available....

REDDING – A 62-year-old woman gave birth Friday to a healthy 6-pound, 9-ounce baby boy, becoming one of the oldest women in the world to successfully bear a child. The newborn is the 12th child of Janise Wulf, who's also a grandmother of 20 and great-grandmother of three. Wulf and her third husband, Scott, 48, named the red-haired boy, Adam Charles Wulf. He follows just 3½ years behind his older brother, Ian. “I hate to raise one alone, without a sibling,” said Wulf, who was impregnated both times through in vitro fertilization. Wulf has given birth to a total of...

Review of: Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection by Deborah Blum Berkley, 2004 360 pp., $16, paper Science is often at odds with common sense... [T]he most striking counterexample ...would have to be the early 20th-century conviction that physical affection, human contact, and love were irrelevant to infants. For a rather long period of time, the psychology of early childhood went completely off the rails .... More than half of the unhappy orphans assigned to an institution in Buffalo between 1862 and 1875 died before the age of one...Convinced that the deaths were the result...

Chapter 1: The "Problem" of Maternal Desire IT WOULD SEEM THAT EVERYTHING it is possible to say about motherhood in America has already been said. Beckoning us from every magazine rack, beaming out from every channel, is a solution or a revelation or a confession about mothering. Yet in the midst of all the media chatter about staying on track, staying in shape, time crunches, time-savers, and time-outs, there is something unvoiced about the experience of motherhood itself. It sways our choices and haunts our dreams, yet we shy away from examining it with our full attention. Treated both as...