'Love' hormone's dark side may explain secondary infertility

Lorraine

You know that "love hormone" we've talked about many times here? Women get a rush of oxytocin when we give birth, and so it is the physiological underpinning for the love and connection we feel towards our babies right after they are born. Some of us get more, some of us get less, but it is likely the reason that many of us end up grieving so long and so deeply for our children after we relinquish them to others. It's why some of us search for our children. It's the reason some of us are praying that our children find us one day. We remember the feeling of the love we felt for them at the time they were born. Supposedly, it makes us feel good--men and women get a release of it after sex. The hormone has such a good reputation that it has been tested as an anti-anxiety drug.

Okay, that's one side of it.

A First/Birth Mother remembers the first Easter after surrender, only days earlier

Four generations in 1996

Easter approaches in a few days, we celebrate the resurrection and spring with the symbol of birth: eggs, eggs, eggs galore. At my house nearly twenty friends will drink mimosas and lunch on beet salad and asparagus and eggy dishes and Polish sausage that's only made at Easter time and my mother's prune cake with buttercream frosting, and I will not really have time to relive in my mind that first Easter after I relinquished my daughter. That day I called my parents in Michigan to wish them Happy Easter--or did they call?  I can't remember. I do recall the day was long and I was empty and my daughter's father was with his other family.

I wanted to die.

The Case for More Time Before Signing Surrender Papers

Why does a mother need time after a baby is born before she irrevocably signs him away? What is wrong with prospective adoptive parents being at the hospital when the baby is born, wrong with them cutting the physical cord that connects mother and child? Just about everything. The pressure on a mother to "make a nice couple happy" and relinquish her child can be overwhelming. Recently one of us heard a legislator say: "Why does she [a mother, a birth mother] need time after the baby is born before she signs the papers? She's had seven months to think about it."