Constructing maternal responsibility: narratives of “motherly love” and maternal blame in epigenetics research

Abstract

Research in epigenetics is demonstrating the importance of maternal care towards offspring early in life for long-term health and behavioral outcomes. Although most of this research has been conducted in rodents, these findings are increasingly framing broader debates about mothers’ moral responsibilities for the health of their offspring. In this paper, I investigate the implications of scientific narratives and research agendas of maternal care for current discourses surrounding maternal epigenetic responsibility. I show how despite clear differences between rodent and human contexts of care, researchers tend to construct rodent maternal care as a form of love or emotional commitment. This construction, which ignores fathers’ care for their offspring, reflects widespread social assumptions about mothers’ particular or “natural” capacities to love their children. This has important implications for how we assign moral blame. Because love is important to our widespread understandings of parental virtues, mothers who act “unlovingly” are prone to being judged in an especially harsh manner. By embedding simplistic and gendered assumptions about mothers’ love for their children, then, epigenetics research perpetuates the tendency to consider mothers especially blameworthy where they are perceived as failing to sufficiently care for or love their children.

Keywords:

• epigenetics research
• behavioral epigenetics
• moral responsibility
• maternal care
• ethics
• maternal love

Introduction

Emerging findings in environmental epigenetics are highlighting how mothers’ environments, lifestyles, and behaviors can shape the later-life health outcomes of their offspring. In addition to studies of pre-conception and intrauterine epigenetic effects, emerging research suggests that maternal behavior towards young offspring can have long-term implications for health and behavioral development. For example, the degree of maternal care offspring receive early in life is thought to play an important role in influencing behavioral responses to stress in adulthood (Weaver et al. 2004; Zhang and Meaney 2010). Although most of the work in this area of “behavioral epigenetics” has been conducted in rodents, such findings are increasingly being accepted as evidence for the possibility of similar influences in humans (Jensen Peña and Champagne 2012; Provenzi et al. 2016, 8).

In recent years, scholars in the social sciences have drawn attention to how the focus on mothers in environmental epigenetics research reflects the problematic tendency of depicting mothers as primarily responsible for ensuring the health of their children. This includes work on maternal behavior, which positions maternal care as central to the epigenetic programming of offspring in its experimental designs, data interpretations, and scientific narratives about epigenetics (Kenney and Müller 2018, 808–811; Lappé 2018, 699–700; Lappé and Hein 2021, 469). Despite the fact that most behavioral epigenetics studies have been conducted in animals, and that other kinds of early life experiences can also affect epigenetic programming, such findings are often translated into preventative health prescriptions and media reporting which depict individual mothers as primarily responsible for ensuring the epigenetic health of their offspring. For example, in a New York Times article by Nicholas Kristof on findings of epigenetic programming by maternal behavior, the title of the article – “Cuddle Your Kid!” – directs individual mothers to care for their children more closely (Kristof 2012). This tendency is especially concerning given how the research agendas of environmental epigenetics have largely ignored the role of fathers and other kinds of influences on offspring health, giving the impression that maternal factors are of prime importance to offspring health (Milliken-Smith and Potter 2021, 2; Richardson 2021, 205; Sharp, Lawlor, and Richardson 2018).

There has now been significant discussion about how environmental epigenetics unjustifiably renders mothers morally responsible – and even blameworthy – for offspring health. However, little has been said about how research on maternal behavior in particular does this by supporting moralized narratives about mothers’ love and care for their children. Unlike other areas of environmental epigenetics, research on maternal behavior connects care itself to offspring harms. This is important, because care is a notion that is closely tied to how we typically think about parental obligations and ascribe moral blame. More importantly, it is especially closely tied to how we construct mothers’ moral responsibilities: mothers are primarily expected to provide care for their children, and are often blamed where they are perceived as failing to do so.

In this article, I argue that epigenetics research on maternal care perpetuates the tendency to depict mothers as responsible for the health of their children by reinforcing moralized and gendered narratives about the significance of care and love. I investigate how the research agendas and scientific narratives of studies of maternal behavior in rodents construct mothers’ care for their offspring as a form of emotional care or love for their children, despite clear differences between human and animal contexts of mothering. I then demonstrate how care and love are important to our widespread understandings of parental virtues, and to how we tend to ascribe moral blame. Insofar as behavioral epigenetics research constructs maternal caring behavior as a form of love, it both reflects and perpetuates the social tendency to hold mothers primarily accountable for ensuring their children’s health.

This paper takes a philosophical approach to the question of how epigenetics research contributes to social discourses of maternal responsibility for offspring health. Drawing on moral theory and feminist theoretical approaches, I demonstrate how ideas about mothers’ care and love for their children circulate within behavioral epigenetics research, supporting the widespread tendency in epigenetics health discourses to position mothers as primarily responsible and blameworthy for offspring health outcomes. In doing so, this paper contributes to emerging concerns in bioethics and the social sciences regarding the ethical implications of epigenetics for mothers, women, and pregnant people.¹

Epigenetics and maternal responsibility

In the past few decades, epigenetics has emerged as one of several new postgenomic sciences emphasizing the importance of the environment for early development and later-life health risks. Epigenetic mechanisms are now recognized to play a key role in human gene expression, although much is yet to be understood about their precise nature (Rothstein, Cai, and Marchant 2009, 1). Epigenetic processes involve changes to the chemical modification of DNA, altering how genes are expressed without modifying the DNA sequence itself (1). These changes in gene expression, sometimes called epigenetic “effects,” “marks,” or “modifications,” can remain relatively stable across an organism’s lifetime – although the precise process underlying such changes is still unclear (Dupras and Ravitsky 2016, 538).

Recent findings in epigenetics have generated a great deal of scientific and public interest. Although epigenetic mechanisms are still poorly understood, they appear to open up new avenues for understanding and addressing human health due to increasing knowledge of the responsiveness of epigenetic changes to certain environmental cues (Huang and King 2018, 69; Loi, Del Savio, and Stupka 2013; Meloni and Müller 2018, 1; Thayer and Kuzawa 2011, 799). “Environmental epigenetics” has now emerged as an important sub-field of epigenetics research examining how our environments, lifestyles, and experiences affect epigenetic mechanisms and consequently shape our health trajectories (Meloni and Müller 2018, 1–2; Niewöhner 2011, 283). Environmental and lifestyle factors such as air pollution, diet, smoking, and even stress and trauma are thought to have an impact on the epigenome (Kuzawa and Sweet 2009, 7; Moormann and Hens 2024, 5–6; Rothstein, Cai, and Marchant 2009, 7). Once they are set in place, epigenetic modifications are considered to have a subtle but nonetheless important influence on the development of various non-communicable diseases (Richardson 2021, 162; Thayer and Kuzawa 2011, 799).

Although the epigenome can remain responsive to environmental cues across one’s lifetime, researchers in environmental epigenetics believe that the period of early life is critical for the embedment of epigenetic modifications. Along with scientists in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) field, who hypothesize that various non communicable diseases can be traced back to experiences of adversity during fetal development, epigenetics researchers maintain that the periods of fetal and early childhood development are critical to the establishment of epigenetic effects (Richardson 2015, 217; 2021, 168–171; Rothstein, Cai, and Marchant 2009, 3–6).² During this time, exposure to adverse environmental cues – either indirectly via the intrauterine environment or directly during early childhood – can “program” epigenetic changes, embedding health susceptibilities at the very beginning of one’s life (Lacal and Ventura 2018, 3–4; Rothstein, Cai, and Marchant 2009, 3–6). One of the best-known examples of such programming consists in intrauterine effects. During pregnancy, the lifestyles, experiences, and environments of pregnant women are thought to imprint on the epigenome of the fetus, establishing long-lasting health traits (Richardson 2021, 162). Work in both environmental epigenetics and DOHaD has so far linked pregnant women’s diets, stress levels, exposure to environmental toxins, and smoking and drinking habits to later-life offspring outcomes ranging from obesity, asthma, psychological disorders, and more controversially, intelligence and intellectual disabilities such as autism and ADHD (Rothstein, Cai, and Marchant 2009, 5–9; Richardson 2021, 3). Although the best evidence for such dynamics consists in animal studies, increasing research in human cohorts is widely considered to suggest the existence of similar processes in humans.

Despite the uncertain nature of such findings, studies of intrauterine programming have now led to widespread discussions regarding mothers’ roles in preventing health conditions in their future children. Such discussions have largely attributed responsibility for epigenetic health to prospective mothers and women, whilst ignoring the role of social, structural, and environmental factors, including social inequality, which often contribute to or bring about such exposures in the first place (see, for instance, Mansfield 2012; Turkmendag and Liaw 2022; Valdez 2018). Health recommendations and social discourses around epigenetics have tended to target individual women, advising them to avoid certain environmental exposures or behaviors that could potentially harm their future children (Richardson 2021, 10–13; Juengst et al. 2014, 427). For example, in a recent report from the World Health Organisation which included a plan to prevent harmful alcohol consumption, “women of childbearing age” were urged to avoid drinking alcohol altogether to prevent prenatal alcohol exposure, irrespective of their plans for reproduction (Turkmendag and Liaw 2022, 483–484). The report did not include any recommendations for fathers, despite emerging evidence that paternal drinking may also have an effect on later-life offspring health.

Furthermore, media reporting and pop science articles tend to depict findings of intrauterine programming in oversimplistic and alarmist tones. “Autism Risk Tied to Mom’s Obesity During Pregnancy,” “At Risk from the Womb,” and “Mom’s environment during pregnancy can affect her grandchildren” are just some of the headlines from major news outlets which emphasize the riskiness of mothers’ behaviors and lifestyle factors for their future children (CBS News 2013; Kaiser 2014; Kristof 2010).³

In response to such recommendations, scholars in bioethics and the social sciences have criticized the way that women are often depicted as primarily responsible for ensuring their children’s epigenetic health. Among other factors, scholars have pointed out how epigenetics research itself tends to embed assumptions about maternal responsibility into its research agendas, experimental designs, and scientific narratives. For example, work in environmental epigenetics has largely focused on questions of maternal programming whilst typically neglecting those pertaining to paternal programming. Although there is increasing research on the link between fathers’ exposures and behaviors and later-life offspring health outcomes, for instance via pre-conception pathways, current research efforts have overwhelmingly centered on how mothers’ bodies and behaviors drive epigenetic change in offspring (Milliken-Smith and Potter 2021, 2; Richardson 2021, 205). Additionally, both the experimental designs and scientific depictions of studies of intrauterine programming in particular tend to position maternal bodies as the primary cause of epigenetic programming in offspring (Kenney and Müller 2018, 810; Richardson 2015, 221; Valdez 2018, 432; see also Niewöhner 2011).⁴ This creates an explanatory landscape wherein the mother figures as the dominant point of intervention in the health of offspring, influencing the way health interventions are designed and responsibility for epigenetic health is attributed (Kenney and Müller 2018, 810; Valdez 2018, 432).

While much has now been said about how research on intrauterine programming impacts broader discourses on maternal epigenetic responsibility, only recently have scholars begun to point out how studies in behavioral epigenetics also influence such discussions. Behavioral epigenetics is an important area of epigenetics research studying how experiences of adversity during early life can affect long-term health, functioning, and behavior (Provenzi et al. 2016, 8). One of the key ways that researchers in this area have attempted to study the effects of early-life adversity is by examining variations in parental behavior and programed stress responses in offspring (Jensen Peña and Champagne 2012; Lester et al. 2011, 9; Provenzi et al. 2016, 9). One of the clearest examples of such programming is by “maternal behavior.” In one of the most well-known experiments on maternal behavior, researchers from McGill university demonstrated that the degree of maternal care towards offspring early in life determines later-life stress responsivity (Weaver et al. 2004).

Despite the fact that the best evidence of such dynamics still rests in animal studies, insights in this field are already being taken up in policy and healthcare debates about how best to manage children’s health. For example, Harvard University’s Centre on the Developing Child emphasizes the importance of epigenetics for children’s cognitive development and urges policymakers to support new families in maintaining “nurturing, protective, and stable relationships” (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child 2010, 5–6). CareForKids.com.au, a major internet resource for childcare educators in Australia, draws upon Harvard University’s research to highlight the negative impacts of early childhood experiences of stress and emphasize the importance of quality care for the long-term wellbeing of children (2019).

Recently, scholars in the social sciences have argued that behavioral epigenetics research on maternal-offspring dynamics in particular inadvertently supports problematic assumptions about maternal responsibility for offspring health. For example, Lappé (2018) and Lappé and Hein (2021) have demonstrated how the experimental designs and research practices of rodent studies on maternal behavior situate maternal care as the primary cause of offspring harms, even where researchers acknowledge the importance of other experiences that shape offspring adversity. This has the effect of positioning human mothers as responsible for offspring harms, whilst ignoring the broader social and structural factors which shape caregiving dynamics and other experiences of adversity (Lappé 708; Lappé and Hein 469). However, some scholars have emphasized that researchers’ narratives about their experiments also tend to depict mothers as responsible for offspring health. For instance, Kenney and Müller (2018) argue that scientists in behavioral epigenetics have tended to make unjustified claims about the relevance of animal findings to human contexts, embedding oversimplistic and decontextualized notions of maternal care which reinforce traditional notions of mothers’ moral responsibilities for the health of their children (808–811).

When epigenetics research agendas already tend to center on mothers, the narratives researchers construct about their findings matter to how studies of epigenetic programming are translated into broader health discourses. However, while there has now been significant discussion about how researchers’ translations of animal findings to human contexts reflect oversimplistic and stereotypical assumptions about maternal responsibility, there has been little attempt to elaborate on the philosophical and normative aspects of responsibility itself in this context. Although “moral responsibility” is a term that is often broadly employed to denote people’s moral obligations as well as their blameworthiness for past actions, these two aspects have distinct moral connotations. This matters for how we judge mothers’ actions in the context of epigenetics findings, since mothers are often considered not only morally obliged to care for their children, but particularly blameworthy where they are perceived as having failed in their moral duties of care. Given this, I see it as imperative to investigate how researchers’ narratives about their findings might inform social assumptions about not only what the moral obligations of mothers are, but under what circumstances mothers can be blamed for their past actions.

In the following sections, I explore why care – and in particular, love – is especially significant to how we conceptualize mothers’ moral obligations and assign moral blame. I will begin by examining how maternal care is constructed in behavioral epigenetics research, particularly in researchers’ narratives about their work. Insofar as maternal care is characterized as not only as a physical caring capacity but also an emotional commitment, it carries important moral connotations which influence how such findings are translated into broader discourses of epigenetic responsibility.

Narratives in behavioral epigenetics of maternal care and “motherly love”

Behavioral epigenetics is now an important area of environmental epigenetics studying how experiences of care and adversity influence the epigenome (Lappé 2018, 699). Alongside emerging evidence that early exposure to environmental stressors can have lasting health effects via epigenetic mechanisms, research in behavioral epigenetics is demonstrating how early-life experiences of adversity can influence biology, behavior, and functioning (Lester et al. 2011, 14; Provenzi et al. 2016, 8). One of the key ways in which researchers in the field have attempted to study the effects of such adversity is via rodent models of parental care and separation – what is sometimes dubbed “parenting effects” (Jensen Peña and Champagne 2012; Lester et al. 2011, 9). Because rodents such as rats and mice are dependent on their mothers during early infancy, mother-offspring dynamics have become a central point of examination in the epigenetic programming of young offspring (although there is increasing research on paternal effects). Mouse and rat behavioral epigenetics studies have now examined the effects of natural variations in maternal care as well as forced separation and deprivation of offspring from their mothers (Lappé and Hein 2021, 465).

Although rodent models offer a unique opportunity to study the effects of early-life experiences of adversity and care, it is not straightforward as to whether such findings are applicable to human contexts. While rodents are often used in biomedical research for their similarity to human anatomy, physiology, and genetics, whether they are an acceptable model for human epigenetic development in the context of the parental behavioral environment is yet to be seen. Moreover, in other species, males do play a role in the care and upbringing of their offspring (Richardson 2015, 222). Yet, current behavioral epigenetics agendas continue to center on rodent contexts of maternal behavior. How, then, do researchers justify this focus?

To answer this question, I turn to one of the most influential studies of behavioral epigenetics, the 2004 experiment “Epigenetic Programming by Maternal Behaviour” by Weaver et al. Although it has now been widely critiqued by scientists and scholars alike, this study in particular continues to be referenced in the scientific literature as a key example of how health and behavioral changes can be programed epigenetically by early mother-offspring interactions.⁵ In the experiment, researchers from McGill University, headed by neuroscientist Michael Meaney and geneticist Moshe Szyf, studied the epigenetic effects of how frequently mother rats lick and groom their young – what the researchers call “maternal care.” The researchers examined epigenetic modifications in genetic regions related to brain development that determine stress responses. They argued that the degree to which rat mothers lick and groom their newborns alters the newborns’ epigenomes in these regions, with implications for stress responses. Less frequent licking and grooming was found to be correlated with more anxious and aggressive behaviors in offspring later in life. Put simply, the more maternal care offspring received early in life, the less likely they were to be stressed as adults.

In subsequent papers, the researchers in the McGill group have argued that these findings are significant for understanding the epigenetic effects of early-life care in humans. A paper by Moshe Szyf and Michael Meaney, for instance, emphasizes the importance of the nature of the care children receive based on these rodent findings, warning that “children raised in deprived environments can have severe cognitive and behavioural difficulties that last into adulthood” (2005, 456). Explaining the relevance of contexts of care in rats to those in humans, Meaney and Szyf write that “Like humans, rodent maternal behaviour towards offspring can effect long-term changes in responses of the offspring to stress throughout the rest of their lives.”

Despite the boldness of these statements, it is not in fact obvious that the kinds of rat maternal behaviors in this and similar studies are clearly translatable to human contexts. We know that human mothers’ behavior differs significantly from that of rats; human mothers do not lick or groom their young or practice arched-back nursing. Given this, how do the researchers justify the idea that such findings are relevant to human contexts? In their analysis of Weaver et al.’s experiment, social scientists Kenney and Müller (2018) draw attention to one particularly illuminating example of how the researchers conceptualize the relevance of animal findings to human contexts. At a summer school at the University of Utah, Moshe Szyf described his group’s findings in the following manner:

So, the way a mother rat takes care of its pups is by licking and grooming, nipple switching and arched-back nursing. So there are rats that do a lot of licking and grooming, and there are rats that do very little, but most rats are in between. So that resembles human behavior as well. Right, you have mothers that are highly mothering and mothers that could not care less. And most mothers are somewhere in between. So if you look at these rats, so all you do is you observe them and you put them in separate cages, so you put the high lickers in one cage – not the mothers, but the offspring – and the low lickers in another cage […] And you look in the brain and you see that those who have high licking mothers express a lot of glucocorticoide receptor gene and those who are low lickers express low. That reflects the number of receptors and that results in a different stress response. But this is not the only difference. We found later on there are hundreds of genes that are differently expressed. So if you get a [genetic] mutation, you know a polymorphism once in a million  …  here, just the motherly love changes hundreds of genes in one shot. And it changes them in a very stable way so that you can look at the old rat and you can say whether it was licked or not. (“Beyond the Central Dogma Summer Institute,” Genetic Science Learning Centre, University of Utah, 2008. https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/epigenetics/rats/)

As Kenney and Müller point out, this explanation is particularly striking for how it conflates rodent and human contexts of mothering. Here, we find an explicit move from a specific set of rat behaviors to ideas about human mothering. Rat mothers who lick and groom their pups frequently are – just like human mothers, we are told – “highly mothering,” while those who do so less frequently “could not care less” (809–810). The difference between rat and human expressions of care, as well as the question of whether similar variations in mothering can be observed in both species, is ignored entirely. The phrase “motherly love” is particularly problematic: even if we were prepared to accept that certain comparisons can be made between rat and human contexts of caring and mothering, the love a human mother feels for their child can hardly be compared to what a rat mother feels for its offspring.

Szyf’s narrative is a prime example of how ideas about human and rat contexts of mothering intermingle in epigenetics experiments of maternal care, even in the absence of sufficient evidence to support such translations.⁶ As Kenney and Müller argue, this is problematic not only from a scientific perspective, but also for how it supports stereotypical and decontextualized notions of maternal care and responsibility. Insofar as mothering is equated with quintessentially maternal/feminine acts of care and nurture, such narratives reinforce narrow social roles for mothers and the widespread belief that mothers are primarily morally responsible for the health of their children (808–811; 815).⁷

However, while it is certainly true that such narratives naturalize maternal care, exactly how this figuration of motherhood comes to support notions of mothers’ moral obligations and maternal blame needs to be further investigated. Building on Kenney and Müller’s account, we can specify two key ways in which mothering is naturalized or otherwise constructed in a stereotypically gendered manner. This first concerns maternal care as a particular biological or physiological behavior. Insofar as maternal behavior is associated with quintessentially maternal capacities of nurture and reproduction, mothering is naturalized as a particular biological capacity. Licking, grooming and arched-back nursing might not be exactly the behaviors which human mothers engage in, but they are classic examples of nurture, and hence the kinds of care which human mothers are widely assumed to give to their young children (for instance, breastfeeding and physical intimacy). At the narrative level in particular, the act of comparing the behavior of human mothers to that of animals also serves to naturalize mothers’ behaviors. Referencing examples in nature, including animal behaviors, is a common way in which stereotypes about human behavior and biology continue to be upheld in popular discourse. Ideas about human gender roles, for instance, often find purchase in metaphors about other species’ physiology and behavior, such as mating rituals wherein males compete with one another and seduce “passive” females.⁸ By comparing human mothers’ behavior to that of rats, the latter of whose behavior is taken to be instinctual, human mothers’ behavior is represented as similarly natural, essential, and biologically innate.

The second way in which mothering is naturalized, however, concerns the emotional aspects of maternal care. In Szyf’s story, we find the idea that mothers’ care towards their children – whether it be that of rats or humans – actually reflects a form of love. Szyf explains that “you have mothers that are highly mothering and mothers that could not care less […] Here, just the motherly love changes hundreds of genes in one shot.” What is noteworthy about this description is not only how Szyf makes unjustified leaps from rodent to human contexts of behavior, but also how he jumps from what is essentially a bio-behavioral mechanism – here, involving nursing and other stereotypical acts of nurture – to an emotional concept of care. Despite the fact that there are presumably great differences in emotional capacity and experience between rats and humans, the idea that rodent care is an example of "motherly love" is accepted without question.

While not all researchers in behavioral epigenetics continue to make such bold claims about the relevance of their work to human contexts,⁹ animal studies like Weaver et al.’s are often understood as illuminating the importance of human caregiving. Interestingly, although researchers profess a diverse range of perspectives on the significance of their work to human contexts, they have often tended to view such findings as significant for not just physical caregiving but also emotional bonding during early life. For example, in a series of interviews with researchers involved in epigenetics studies of early-life adversity, one psychologist working in a clinical setting explained that research such as Meaney’s provided important insights into the health of preterm infants. She described the “physical environment, the painful stimulations, [and] the maternal separation” pertaining to neonatal intensive care as stressful for newborns in ways similar to the experiences of the McGill group’s rat pups, and asserted that these studies demonstrate the importance of “sustaining early contact with the mother [and] sustaining the physical and emotional bonding” while infants are in the NICU [emphasis added] (Lappé and Hein, 468).

What emerges from such narratives, then, is the social assumption that mothers not only have a particular propensity to provide physical care for their children, but also that they are naturally inclined towards loving and fostering emotional bonds with their children. This should come as little surprise, since, at least in Western contexts, well-known gender stereotypes depict mothers as caring and nurturing, providing both emotional and physical care for their children. Fathers, on the other hand, “protect and provide” for their families; emotional bonding and love is an admirable, though not strictly morally necessary, behavior for the father. The notion that mothers are particularly inclined towards loving and emotionally bonding with their children is exemplified in care ethicist Nel Noddings’ description of mothers’ feelings for their children. As Noddings puts it,

Mothers quite naturally feel with their infants […] Responding to my own child crying in the night may require a physical effort, but it does not usually require what might be called an ethical effort. I naturally want to relieve my child’s distress. (LaChance Adams 2014, 19)

On Noddings’ view, which has since been criticized by various feminist thinkers as patriarchal and even dangerous, mothers’ “natural inclination” to worry for their children is what helps them fulfill their moral duties of care. On the other hand, the father – “the detached one” – must rely upon reason to care for his children when natural inclination fails.

The problem with such accounts is not only that they tend to assign the burden of caring primarily to women and mothers. The problem also has to do with how they construct maternal care simply as an emotional capacity or involvement with one’s offspring. Taken at face value, such an idea is not controversial; caring of course involves emotions such as love, and that such a form of care is biologically and morally important should strike us as rather innocuous. However, that mothers’ care and love alone are being linked to offspring health outcomes – and in particular, to offspring harms – has important implications for current discourses around maternal epigenetic responsibility. This is because the emotional aspects of care are particularly important to how we characterize parental virtues. In the following section, I will explain what I mean by “parental virtues” and how this is important to current discourses of responsibility, with special attention to the implications of these virtues for moral blame.

Parental virtues and blameworthiness

So far, I have argued that the research agendas and scientific narratives of behavioral epigenetics research on animals depict mothering and maternal care partly (but nonetheless vitally) as an emotional involvement or commitment to one’s children. This idea is problematic since, as I will now demonstrate, it is closely tied to how we conceptualize parental virtues – and especially maternal virtues – and assign moral blame.

To begin, it can be said that parents are widely considered to bear particular moral obligations towards their children. By “particular" moral obligations, I mean the idea that parents (and parents alone) are uniquely or specially positioned to provide care for children. Although the exact nature and basis of these obligations is debated, I think it can be widely agreed upon that parents have some kind of particular moral duty towards their children. Because they are particularly positioned as the caregivers of their children, moreover, being a parent is often considered to entail embodying certain moral virtues. For example, a “good parent” may be thought of as kind, attentive, patient, and loving, while a “bad parent” is one who is cruel, neglectful, impatient, and unloving.

While it is not within the scope of this article to establish the basis of parental virtues, I think that such an idea can capture our widespread social understandings of parents’ moral responsibilities. Typically, embodying virtues such as kindness or patience is considered an important aspect of what it takes to be a truly good parent. We can imagine, for instance, a parent who fulfills all the necessary moral duties towards their child, such as ensuring they safely arrive at school, feeding them healthy meals, and so on. However, a parent who does all these things for the wrong reasons – for instance, because they fear the social repercussions of neglecting their child, or merely because they view it as their duty to do so – would not strictly be considered a good parent. That is, a good parent should genuinely want to do all these things; they should make sure their child safely arrives at school precisely because they are concerned for their child’s safety, and because they love and care for them.

Understanding the role of virtue in our commonsense approaches to parents’ moral responsibilities matters, because oftentimes, virtue is important to how and to what degree we assign moral blame. Here, it is important to introduce a distinction between moral obligations and blameworthiness. Although “moral responsibility” is a term that is often used to denote both moral obligations and blameworthiness, in moral theory, these two terms have distinct connotations. Moral obligations normally refer to the moral duties one has in a forward-looking sense; that is, what is morally expected or required of a person in a current situation or one which might arise in the future (Talbert 2023). On the other hand, blameworthiness refers to whether a person can be held morally responsible – that is, be blamed – for their past actions. Although the usefulness and reasons behind this distinction are heavily debated, one widely accepted view is that blameworthiness entails a kind of “reactive attitude” wherein our holding someone responsible for past actions often (whether justifiably or not) involves an emotional aspect (Strawson 1962 [1993], 56). For example, in blaming someone for a wrongdoing, I am not just claiming that what they have done is wrong, but I am also expressing my resentment or indignation at their actions.¹⁰

Viewing blameworthiness as a kind of reactive attitude is useful in the context of understanding the role of virtue in moral responsibility. Although virtue is something that can be considered morally important for parents to aspire to, it is difficult to construe this as an obligation per se.¹¹ However, virtue is certainly important to how we typically react to instances of perceived wrongdoing. Consider, for example, medical and social discourses around reproduction and breastfeeding which often consider “natural” modes of birth and breastfeeding as optimal for fetal and child health. Interestingly, such debates tend to hold mothers morally accountable not only for their supposed failure to engage with such natural processes, but also for their perceived lack of commitment to, care for, or love of their children. For example, on a babycentre.com bulletin board discussion about the ethical status of elective c-sections, various entries reflect the sentiment of Ashley, who writes that “I am totally against elective c-sections […] A smart woman who loves her child will avoid having a c-section if at all possible” [emphasis added] (Kukla 2008, 77). Birth anthropologist Brigitte Jordan claims that “A semi-conscious mother who does not hear her baby’s first cry and a narcotised infant whose reactions are weak are off to a bad interactional start” (76). Jordan goes on to tell a story about a mother who “gave up” during labor (supposedly after excessive medical intervention) and whose baby was born after the labor was artificially restimulated, saying “I hope she still loves her baby” (76). In popular culture, mothers who chose caesareans are sometimes treated with explicit distaste (an article in the Vancouver Sun reads “Too posh to push Moms set bad example for society” (76)), and in some cases their actions are seen as harmful to the wellbeing of the baby, despite evidence that this is not the case.

What such discourses reveal, of course, is not only the perceived moral importance of virtues such as care and love to parents’ actions, but how these virtues in particular are seen as especially important to mothers. Perhaps because of their supposedly innate and singular capacity to provide emotional love and care for their children, the moral virtue of love or care is widely understood as integral to how morally good or bad mothers’ actions towards their children are. That is, when a mother fails to care for her children, the wrongdoing consists not only in the harm itself; it is also consists in the fact that the mother acted unlovingly. Of course, this assumption, though widespread, is erroneous. Unlike in rodents, fathers and other caregivers apart from mothers are often capable of fostering emotional bonds with children. However, it is women who are often met with expressions of moral indignation, anger, and outrage when they are perceived as having failed to care for their children sufficiently.

This tendency to blame mothers for their failure to care for or love their children is problematic not only because it is gendered, but also because there is a tendency to perceive mothers’ actions as unloving or uncaring when this is not necessarily the case. For example, when mothers do not provide their children with emotional support, this is not necessarily because they do not love their children, but may be due to a lack of adequate support, stressful living conditions, or where the parent themselves faces abuse or violence. Moreover, cases such as post-partum depression demonstrate how, even though mothers may want to love their children, these feelings may not always come as naturally or easily as is assumed.

In directly linking mothers’ care for their children to offspring harms, however, behavioral epigenetics researchers’ narratives perpetuate this tendency to blame mothers in particular for offspring harms. Such narratives often characterize both rodent and human mothers simplistically as loving and caring, or otherwise unloving and lacking in emotional warmth,¹² a characterization which ignores the complexities of human emotions and motivation. Further, in focusing on maternal care or love as the primary agent of epigenetic change in offspring, such narratives fail to acknowledge the importance of environmental, structural, and social factors that can influence mothers’ behaviors and their abilities to love and foster emotional connections with their children. Although researchers often view their findings as highlighting the need to provide adequate support to new and vulnerable mothers, in simplistically linking mothers’ love and care for their children to offspring harms, this research is more likely to shift responsibility and blame onto mothers. For example, the New York Times article by Kristof mentioned earlier in this paper reported how the McGill group’s findings highlight the importance of upbringing – including factors such as “toxic stress” and “attentive parenting” – for the long-term health and flourishing of children. Interestingly, although Kristof argues that these findings support the need to develop antipoverty solutions and provide support to at-risk mothers, the title of his article rather contradictorily directs individual mothers to care for their children more closely, shifting the moral imperative onto mothers despite acknowledging the importance of other factors such as poverty and support (Kristof 2012). In another article, Annette Markus, associate editor of Nature Neuroscience, reported on the implications of the McGill group’s findings with the title “Loving Mothers Ease Stress Through Epigenetics.” Like Kristof, Markus appears to criticize the tendency to simplistically attribute responsibility to mothers for offspring harms. She acknowledges that “‘Bad mothers’ have long been held responsible for behavioral problems in their children,” and even goes as far as to cite the now disgraced notion of how “refrigerator mothers”. However, in the very same paragraph, she goes on to emphasize the significance of mothers’ behaviors to offspring health by explaining, “New work from Michael Meaney’s group […] indicates a plausible mechanism to explain how early maternal behavior might wield such long-term influence over the offspring,” nonetheless representing mothers’ love for their children as both biologically and morally salient.

To reiterate, I am not arguing here that mothers’ care for their children is of little moral importance. Rather, what I have attempted to show is how mothers’ love for their children is often understood as especially morally important. In epigenetics studies of maternal care, this social assumption comes to be embedded in the form of simplistic and gendered mother-offspring dynamics, a point which scholars have now emphasized with regard to broader research in environmental epigenetics. This contributes to the tendency to hold mothers especially blameworthy where they are perceived as having failed to act lovingly towards their children. Rather than blame mothers for failing to provide love to their children, we need to question what not only being a “good” mother entails, but also what the moral responsibilities of all parents may be in the context of findings in epigenetics.

Conclusion

In this article, I have sought to demonstrate how research in behavioral epigenetics perpetuates the tendency to hold mothers in particular morally accountable for offspring harms. In studies of maternal care in particular, mothers’ care for their offspring is often constructed not only as a particular physical or biological capacity inherent to mothers, but also as an emotional capacity. This occurs even in rodent studies, where the differences between rodent and human contexts of behavior are ignored by certain researchers, or otherwise where models of maternal care come to inform how researchers understand the nature and relevance of caregiving in humans. This has the effect of naturalizing maternal care and reinstating traditional stereotypes, such as the idea that mothers have “natural instincts” or inclinations to care for their children and that mother-offspring dynamics are a prime example of love.

While there has been increasing attention in the social sciences on the unjustified and often gendered claims researchers in behavioral epigenetics (and environmental epigenetics more broadly) make about their work, my aim has been to more explicitly demonstrate how such claims and the scientific constructs they refer to further support problematic ideas about maternal responsibility in particular. I have argued that this occurs in two ways. Firstly, naturalizing mothers’ love for their children and positioning it as a critical determinant of offspring health reinforces the assumption that mothers have a particular moral obligation to care for their children in this way. This assumption is problematic not only because it is gendered, but also because it ignores the fact that other caregivers (such as fathers) can provide emotional support to children. Secondly, linking mothers’ love (and mothers’ love alone) for their children to offspring health outcomes furthers the tendency to blame mothers where they are perceived as failing in their caring duties. However, insofar as it ignores the complexities inherent in mothering and constructs caregiving behaviors as a form of love, behavioral epigenetics is likely to contribute to unjustified attributions of maternal blame that (a) fail to account for the importance of other conditions in supporting mothers’ care for their children, and (b) often misconstrues mothers’ actions as unloving or uncaring.

As work in behavioral epigenetics and maternal programming progresses, it is imperative for researchers to attend to how their findings affect broader discourses of responsibility. Researchers need to situate findings of epigenetic programming in animals appropriately so as not to further support unjustified speculations about mothers’ particular or special moral responsibilities to care for and love their children. However, there is also a need to critically analyse current research agendas of maternal care, which have the potential to inform social debates about responsibility even when researchers do acknowledge the limitations of their work appropriately. Such an effort will certainly include further expanding current research questions to include fathers and other forms of adversity beyond maternal-offspring dynamics. Although epigenetics appears to lend scientific credibility to the importance of care during early life, to imply that mothers alone are responsible for this is both scientifically and morally unjustified.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Monash University.

Notes

1 I use the term “women and pregnant people” to more inclusively refer to those who are pregnant or who are capable of becoming so. However, partly for the sake of succinctness and partly because it is the term frequently used in the scientific and bioethics literature, I use the term “mothers” throughout this article to refer to parents who perform those caring behaviors typically associated with female reproductive capacities (for example, breastfeeding, cuddling, and other forms of nurture). However, as we shall see, a closer investigation of these behaviors reveals the inadequacy of such a term in categorising these kinds of behaviors. For the time being, suffice it so say that not all those who identify as mothers will perform (or be capable of performing) such behaviors, and that there are people who do not identify as mothers who do perform (or are capable of performing) them.

2 Note that research has also demonstrated that epigenetic effects can be passed on via pre-conception pathways. In this regard, epigenetics expands the scope of time during which environmental cues can have biological effects compared to existing insights in DOHaD. However, these kinds of effects are somewhat more difficult to establish due to several “reprogramming” events which wipe the epigenome clean during and at various stages after conception (a phenomenon which is often discussed in relation to the difficulty of establishing epigenetic inheritance). As it is not within the scope of this article to establish whether such effects can be discussed meaningfully, I have opted to mention here only those “direct” kinds of epigenetic exposures which can strictly be said to impact offspring during early life. These latter effects are moreover the kinds which appear to be more readily backed by findings in DOHaD, which typically emphasise the “first thousand days of life” as being critical to health and development, although it should be noted that findings in this area are also uncertain and contested.

3 For a more thorough exploration of epigenetic risk messaging and media representations of epigenetics, see Lappé (2016) and Juengst et al. (2014).

4 For instance, as Kenney and Müller have shown, the experimental designs of environmental epigenetics tend to produce a focus on the maternal body whilst ignoring other, possibly relevant, environmental factors (806–807).

5 Weaver et al.’s study is especially visible in broader commentaries on epigenetics. According to Nature.com, Weaver et al.’s study has 4,290 citations and 51,000 accesses (As of the date of access April 4, 2023). Additionally, a recording of researcher Moshe Szyf explaining the study results on the platform “Learn.Genetics” hosted by the University of Utah received almost 20 million visits in 2013 (Kenney and Müller 2018, 808–809).

6 Although we can imagine human equivalents – such as cuddling and breastfeeding – as Kenney and Müller point out, these comparisons ought to "be investigated rather than assumed” (823).

7 It should be noted that stereotypes about mothers and not only evident at the narrative level, but are also upheld by the experimental designs of epigenetics research and the legacy of conceptual models of maternal care. As various scholars have now pointed out, the experimental designs of environmental epigenetics, which borrow methods from fields such as molecular biology, often produce a “molecular” focus on environmental context which highlights certain aspects of the environment over others (Niewöhner 2011, 288–291; Lappé and Hein 2021, 461; Valdez 2018, 201; Kenney and Müller 2018). This has the effect of positioning maternal care as central to the production of epigenetic changes and health effects in offspring, even in cases where the researchers actively acknowledge the importance of other environments and experiences in shaping offspring adversity (Lappé and Hein 2021, 468). Furthermore, it should also be noted that conceptual models of maternal care undergird the way that experiments on maternal behavior are constructed and the kinds of claims researchers make about their work. Conceptual models of maternal care have a long history in animal science (Levine 1967). For example, animal models of maternal separation have become critical to scientists’ attempts to understand human mental health disorders (Millstein and Homes 2007). Because rodent offspring are dependent upon their mothers for 1–3 weeks after birth, separation during this time is especially stressful (Nishi, Horii-Hayashi, and Sasagwa 2014). Such models have been instrumental to the current approaches in behavioral epigenetics – including work in mouse models on maternal separation, deprivation, and caregiving adversity – and to how researchers approach and conceptualise work in humans, where scientists often understand human experiences of stress as reflective of those in rodent models.

8 The argument that heterosexuality is “natural” while homosexuality is not has also frequently made reference to supposedly universal male-female couplings in nature – although opponents of this position have also in some cases pointed to examples of homosexuality in animals as a way of justifying the “naturalness” of homosexuality too, demonstrating the power of metaphors about nature in making claims about human existence.

9 Indeed, researchers in the field often acknowledge the limitations of their findings, including the various forms that stress can take beyond maternal-offspring. interactions. Despite this, animal findings are nonetheless framing the ways that researchers approach questions of epigenetic programming in humans. For example, one of the ways in which researchers have conceptualised caregiving adversity in humans is by studying orphans who were severely neglected in facilities outside of the United States (Lappé and Hein 2021, 467). In spite of the fact that human children are not dependant only on their mothers in their early years, researchers often view such natural experiments as having important parallels to rodent experiments, insofar as both involve stressful experiences early in life and “the lack of a stable and consistent caregiver” (467).

10 Although this account of moral responsibility (usually attributed to Strawson) is debated within philosophy, here, I am interpreting it rather uncontroversially as a descriptive account of blameworthiness (rather than, for instance, a metaphysical one). That is, the “reactive attitudes” approach can be understood for now merely as a way of understanding how we usually respond to perceived wrongdoings and moral failures, rather than as implying that there are no metaphysical facts beyond our practices of praise and blame.

11 Although there is rich philosophical discussion on the role of virtue in moral life, it is not within the scope of this paper to explore this literature or the question of how virtue connects to concepts such as moral obligations.

12 Moreover, this research presents important parallels with prior scientific research on autism in terms of how it explicitly links mothers’ emotional care to child health. For example, historical notions of “refrigerator mothers,” for example, which blamed mothers for their children’s autism, characterized mothers as lacking in emotional warmth (Richardson 2015, 132).