If you are going to argue that the maternal instinct can only exist if the woman gives birth to her child, then ...
Who cares what then? I'm not going.
Your reliance on fairy tales to support your argument is telling of your ignorance on this issue.
No. It is telling that I see a nice correspondence between sociobiological arguments and reality. So that I see no reason to wait for "happy people tend to smile" type of scientific research, and the reference to fairy tales is simply one simple and widely known part of the evidence. Once you, for obvious ideological reasons, do not like this, it is clear and expected that you will reject this, and I would not wonder if you even find some "scientific evidence" for this.
There mere suggestion that unfit mothers be made or allowed to keep their children because they would somehow magically be better mothers than a loving stepmother or adopted or foster mother is dangerous and obscene.
Of course, I know, everything which is not politically correct is dangerous and obscene. My very existence is dangerous and obscene, and if political correctness controls the whole world, I have to prepare some method to kill myself if I do not want to end in a reeducation camp. SCNR.
Of course, I do not doubt at all that there are also a lot of cases where even a stepmother is better than the natural mother. Instincts give only a general tendency. But if you compare children which have been grown up by their mothers, and children grown up in institutions for child care, the results are not in favor of child care. Why? Those working in child care have an education about how to care about children which is much better than the average mother, so the result should be much better, not?
I do not argue that it is a good idea to abandon all child care and force all children to live with their parents. In traditional societies, the extended family or some pedophiles care about them, above are no longer available (the former no longer exists, the latter is the ultimate crime today), so that this social function has to be taken by someone else. All I argue for is that those who decide about this should know that taking away a child from his own mother does some real harm to him. So that the question is which harm is greater.
In fact, I would argue in favor of leaving the decision to the child. Without any necessity for a "once and forever" decision. So that the child care institution is open to children who have a conflict with their parents, for the time of this conflict. If the child care institution is really better than the parents, the children will remain there forever. But if the child prefers to live with his parents, so be it. (Don't worry, children are egoists, they care about themselves - this is their instinct. But, of course, you know better what is good for them.
)
Of course. (As if I would have said "always".) Postnatal depression is relevant only for a very special part of filicide - the killing of newborn children by their mother. Which was what you have referred to, with "
Mothers are more likely to kill their own newborns than a stepmother is likely to kill a stepchild".
So you also reject the biological imperative, being argued by wellwisher, which he says is why men to sexually harass women?
Fine that you start to recognize this.
Instincts are not imperatives. We are in no way morally obliged to follow them. Instead, some of our instincts are antisocial, and a problem for every civilized society. Is this a clear enough rejection of the idea of "biological imperatives"?
But then comes the part which you, it seems, don't like. Namely that it is nonetheless important to distinguish instincts from purely cultural habits. Because purely cultural habits can be changed without problems, while instincts cannot be changed. So, to handle antisocial instincts, one has to find/invent/create cultural ways to live with them in a civilized way. And to distinguish the human instincts from purely cultural habits is not easy. One possibility to do this is sociobiology - if something can be understood as having a sociobiological explanation, it makes it much more probable that it is an instinct. Another one is cross-cultural comparisons. Things which are part of our instincts will be recognized in almost every society. Things which are purely cultural will tend to be very different in different cultures.
Similar to the problem which the left has traditionally with these points. They like fantasies about the power of education, and a human being with instincts which survive education is dangerous for these fantasies. As well as the idea that some of the problems which exist in all known human societies would exist even in their communist paradise too.