That's just my take, though - but it's only a matter of time until some unbiased gender researcher (who is not predetermined to prove suppression of women) will set out to confirm it.
Edit: honestly, downvotes of this comment make me laugh. Do you feel so threatened by an opinion that does not require suppression of women to explain our modern reality?
Your second sentence doesn't follow from your first. There isn't anything inherent in the ability to give birth that gives mothers "first choice" of spending time with their children forevermore or more "bargaining power" in their romantic relationships than their partner. The only thing biologically inherent to childbirth is the ability to carry and birth children.
And last time I checked, men can't breastfeed no matter how hard they may try.
I wasn't the one who downvoted you, but I think it's unfortunate that you're citing a social practice to try and establish biological fact and claiming to understand what I "know."
Nothing about a distinctly female presence is necessary for a child's proper development, much less the specific woman that birthed the baby originally. All the major psychological associations that I know of support gay adoption as healthy for children. The biologically necessary thing is a loving parental presence, gender non specific. Formula exists and can be given to children, midwives existed to feed babies before that.
For older children , any loving adult care is fine. But the original post was about the priority the mother has, indicating post-birth.
1. Let's replace "essential" with "optimal". The original point still stands.
2. You conveniently omitted the 9-month bonding time.
3. Formula is good enough, but breast milk is optimal. Never heard of midwives breastfeeding other women's babies in 21st century.
4. Researchers have long known that newborns recognize – and prefer – their mom's voice. http://www.babycenter.com/404_is-it-true-that-babies-can-rec...
2. Yes, I did. It didn't seem relevant to the point I was arguing, see #1.
3. For optimal, see 1, and for midwives—yes, and that's a societal trend rather than a biological fact.
4. True but still irrelevant, see #1.
I'm not arguing that biological mothers aren't generally inclined to want to spend more time with their children than their male partners, or that newly born infants aren't going to instinctively want to spend time with their mothers. It's just OP's original claim didn't logically follow from the evidence he presented—nothing about childbirth necessitates women having "the first choice to spend time with those children, and [...] bargaining power in relationships."
Also, breast-feeding is how nature intends it, milk formula (invented relatively recently) is a crutch. So it does give women an advantage over men. As for midwives - they are women, not men.
Following your reasoning, we could say "there is nothing that necessitates sex between a man and a woman" - because we have in-vitro conception?
My understanding is that they can lactate. Normally this is the result of certain medications, but I think all the necessary equipment is there and stimulation alone could cause it. But I don't suspect it would provide enough nutrients.
The first (option to spend time with children): maybe that just follows from the bargaining power. But if you have been present at the birth of your kids, maybe you can agree that it seems ridiculous to take children away from their mother shortly after birth, after all they have been through. The importance of breast feeding is another aspect, although obviously children can also grow up without that.
It's only feminism that needs to frame mothering as a form of suppression, because otherwise their narrative would fall apart. The reality is that it is usually a privilege (a fair privilege, but still) that women gladly accept. (Yes, women who don't enjoy spending time with their children exist, ask your local feminist for a bunch of anecdotes. They are still a minority).
The multiplicity of options that women currently have (stay at home mom without shame and/or a career), is a result of how our society reacts to the biological fact of childbirth (among other things), not an innate result inherent to the fact itself. You suggest this yourself by saying "unless women are being enslaved or raped (not the norm in the first world), they control who gets to procreate." In other societies, the ability to give birth could result in widely different outcomes for women.
Additional edit: Even accepting your premise that women have more "bargaining power" than men in interpersonal relationships, that would again be a function of society's reaction to biology rather than biology itself. It's true that bearing a child to term takes several orders of magnitude more time and resources than the act of impregnating someone. But the idea that "limited resources have a price" and so the people who can become pregnant have leverage against the ones who don't isn't biological. Limited resources could just as well be seized and then redistributed by the government to the general population for free. The fact of childbirth is biological, but the reaction is societal.
The only thing you need to assume to understand the modern situation of men vs women is that women can give birth and men can't. That is a purely functional thing, no "biological programming" necessary. I am not making any claims about biological programming.
Are you saying plausibly women could be seized by the government and distributed to men to create children? I think this actually happens in some societies/cults, or it even was the norm in the past (and in the third world, where arranged marriages are the norm). But we are talking about western society here.
Still, it might not be that easy to distribute wombs - women can perhaps secretly abort pregnancies or use contraceptives, or make themselves infertile.
Again, if you have witnessed your wife giving birth, I think the idea to take the children away from her becomes quite absurd. There is a reason it is usually not randomly determined who gets to stay home to look after the offspring. (Historically presumably other factors, too, such as pregnant women and women after birth not being able to do hard manual work which was necessary for survival - so the division of work was a no-brainer).
So I have a lot of trouble understanding your point about the scarcity of the womb. It is usually the vagina that men are after, not the womb.
Also, if having a womb were such a precious and rare resource, poverty in America shouldn't be overwhelmingly women and their children.
(Edit: It should have said "overwhelmingly." Statistically, in America, poverty skews strongly along demographic lines and the largest cohort is single moms and their kids.)
Does poverty overwhelm single women, or married women? You have to trade well... Can't really comment on the poverty issue of women and children in the US. In my country, technically child support goes to the children, not the mother, which leads to technically (on paper) some mothers having not a lot money. I think they can use their children's money to pay for housing, food and other things, so I am not sure how poor they really are.
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Edit: HN doesn't let me write more comments, so here is my reply to Mz's comment below:
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Your observations about male desires and behavior only support my point: if men would call the shots, would you expect many long term relationships and marriages? My claim is women control procreation and get to make demands in exchange. That claim is consistent with your observation of male behavior.
The story is of course oversimplified (this is just an internet comments forum): of course men have some value, sometimes. As your poverty example shows, men are helpful in providing for women and children via their work power. There are some "markets" where the power dynamics are reversed. For example I remember an article about places in the US where most black men are in jail, so the few eligible non-jailed men are in high demand. And as expected, they are not very willing to settle down. There also was that recent story in Vanity fair about men on Tinder in New York, with the same power dynamics, but I thought that article was rather low quality.
Women have their own desires - they would like to not put all eggs into one basket and have kids with multiple men (genetic diversity, better chances). That is why supposedly one in five children are cuckoo children (which I myself find very hard to believe, but I have read that several times). It's also why women don't signal strongly when they can get pregnant and get impregnated inside of the body, so that men can't be sure who is the father of the kids - and that's also why we want sex all the time, not just during periods of fertility.
As for the poverty, how exactly does it work, where do the men go? Either they are poor as well, or they are dead, or left the country? In my country fathers have to give everything they earn except for a minimum to their kids if they are liable for child support. Maybe it demotivates some of them so they stop earning money, that might be a possibility.
I am well aware that nature makes sex desirable in order to encourage procreation. As you said, "that's nature's trick." That doesn't mean men actually desire to procreate. From what I have seen, a lot of men want fun without consequences and children are consequences many of them have no desire to deal with.
Suffice it to say, I don't agree with you. But you already knew that.
I think all your data points actually support my thesis.
This is true, but until recently("recent" in evolutionary time), the two were one and the same as far as cause and effect went.
The lure of sexual release may be nature's way of tricking humans into making babies, but we aren't all rubes. We don't just let nature have its way with us.
Also yes you can bargain away your sexual attractiveness, but sexual attractiveness of women only exists because of wombs. Think a bit more general.