Has Poverty Ravaged Mother Love In The Shantytowns Of Brazil?

According to “Death Without Weeping: Has Poverty Ravaged Mother Love in the Shantytowns of Brazil?” by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, mothers in Brazil are faced with so much death everyday that they expect it, indifferent to the death of even their own children. After Scheper-Hughes asks a Brazilian woman why church bells ring so often, the woman replies to her with a lack of concern, saying that they simply represent another child death, another “angel gone to heaven.” Child deaths in Brazil occur so often that women lose track of the amount of babies that come and go. In fact, according to Scheper-Hughes, “most had died unnamed and were hastily baptized in their coffins.” This demonstrates the fact that with the number of infants that pass away, individuals, …show more content…
This area of Brazil is the most poverty-stricken in the country, “representative of the Third World within a dynamic and rapidly industrializing nation” (Scheper-Hughes). Women are expected to work a great deal, unable to properly take care of their children. They cannot take their children to work because of dangerous environmental factors, often leaving their infants home with the risk of dying alone. Plus, food and water shortages, and other miserable conditions which occur in their daily life make the death of infants seem almost natural, and definitely anticipated. Because of the thin chances of survival infants have in Brazil, they do not do enough to save them or take care of them, having no hope in their survival. “Mothers stepped back and allowed nature to take its course” (Scheper-Hughes). Often, even the few children who manage to survive do not blame their mothers for their lack of care and concern for their health, because the conditions are too dangerous for