Treating Postpartum Depression when Reproductive Mortality is ~100%?

Postpartum depression among humans is a thing that is "normal" insofar as it happens a lot, but it is not "normal" in the sense of "a thing that we don't worry about"; it doesn't happen to absolutely everyone, and we do in fact put (varying amounts of) effort into educating people about it and treating women for it.

For a lot of creatures, however, the idea that you just give up and die after reproducing is entirely normal. Obviously, there are the examples where reproduction is necessarily mechanically fatal (like some adult insects which don't even bother having mouths because they won't live long enough to need to eat... and so can't live long after reproducing, because they can't eat), about which very little can be done, but there are also plenty of semelparous organisms that probably could survive indefinitely with appropriate hormone treatments and feeding, but which naturally just don't bother--like, for example, female octopuses which don't eat while tending their eggs for their entire gestation, and then lose the will to live and continue to starve to death after their eggs have hatched.

I know of several fictional depictions of semelparous aliens with mechanically-unavoidable maternal death (e.g., the alternate-universe aliens from Greg Egan's Orthogonal series and the Martians from Harry Turtledove's A World of Difference), and in both cases the development of medical technology to allow mothers to survive birth is treated as a major positive development for civilization (although with more realistic levels of conservative backlash in the former case)*. I am not totally convinced that that is how it would always go, but I can accept it in an individual work insofar as the aliens are depicted as somehow not having a psychological makeup adapted to this mode of reproduction.

But suppose a species more like octopuses, with primarily psychological semelparity (i.e., the mother's body can still function, mechanistically speaking, but they uniformly just give up on life anyway), were to develop intelligence and civilization. Recognizing that there is likely to be intercultural variability across the species, does it seem plausible that they would at some point actually decide to try to treat "postpartum depression" and preserve life? And if so, how early in their technological development?

*Side note: in real-world cases of semelparity, males tend to die as well, and earlier than females--male octopuses die after insemination, male salmon die after fertilization, and male spiders and preying mantises get straight-up eaten by their mates. Both of these fictional portrayals are a bit weird in that they present males as continuing caregivers after the mother's body is destroyed.

posted over 4 years ago

Logan R. Kearsley‭

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