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Comment by jazzyk | Hacker News Reader

There is one more thing I did not mention. The 9-month-long mother-child bonding time, unavailable to the father, the midwife and whoever else.

For older children , any loving adult care is fine. But the original post was about the priority the mother has, indicating post-birth.

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My impression that the first post I replied to was speaking of things in general, not locked to any kind of specific post-birth time frame. Even if it was though, I disagree with the mother's presence specifically being "ESSENTIAL" for the baby's health. Do babies' whose mothers die during childbirth suffer severe developmental disorders or other problems? What about babies that are immediately given to their adoptive parents instead of their biological mother after being born? My understanding is that as long as they receive love, support, and nutrition from an adult of either gender they grow up fine, with single parents being generally less effective than pairs.

Just a few quick points, this is going off-topic:

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...

1. No it doesn't still stand. If a mother's presence is biologically necessary for her child's development in the same way her uterus is necessary for fetal development, then the OP is right and childbirth does innately biologically necessitate that women spend more time with their children than their male partners in the same way that it's a biological fact that fathers do not carry fetuses to term and give birth to them. If their presence is, instead of "ESSENTIAL", "optimal" then my question becomes: "optimal" for what compared to what and for whom? It becomes a case of people and the groups they form making decisions to optimize for certain goals by behaving in a particular way, not raw biology empirically operating.

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."

Ad 2. No, you omitted mother-child bonding during pregnancy, because it gives the mother an advantage.

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?

Seriously? Downvotes for stating a fact (not opinion)?

You're as likely to get a positive experience out of sticking your dick in a meat-grinder as posting anything suggesting women and men are not the same on the internet.

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