What babies learn in the womb
By Paul Stark
At CNN.com , Annie Murphy Paul, author of “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives,” writes:
Starting a few years ago, I began
noticing a dazzling array of findings clustered around the prenatal
period. These discoveries were generating considerable excitement among
scientists, even as they overturned settled beliefs about when we start
absorbing and responding to information from our environment. As a
science reporter — and as a mother — I had to find out more.
This research, I discovered, is part
of a burgeoning field known as “fetal origins,” and it’s turning
pregnancy into something it has never been before: a scientific
frontier. Obstetrics was once a sleepy medical specialty, and research
on pregnancy a scientific backwater. Now the nine months of gestation
are the focus of intense interest and excitement, the subject of an
exploding number of journal articles, books, and conferences.
What it all adds up to is this: much
of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life — the air she
breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she’s exposed
to, even the emotions she feels — are shared in some fashion with her
fetus. They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic
as the woman herself. The fetus treats these maternal contributions as
information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world
outside.
By attending to such messages, the
fetus learns the answers to questions critical to its survival: Will it
be born into a world of abundance, or scarcity? Will it be safe and
protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? Will it live a
long, fruitful life, or a short, harried one?
The pregnant woman’s diet and stress
level, in particular, provide important clues to prevailing conditions, a
finger lifted to the wind. The resulting tuning and tweaking of the
fetus’s brain and other organs are part of what give humans their
enormous flexibility, their ability to thrive in environments as varied
as the snow-swept tundra in Siberia and the golden-grassed savanna in
Africa.
The recognition that learning
actually begins before birth leads us to a striking new conception of
the fetus, the pregnant woman and the relationship between them.
The fetus, we now know, is not an
inert blob, but an active and dynamic creature, responding and adapting
as it readies itself for life in the particular world it will soon
enter. The pregnant woman is neither a passive incubator nor a source of
always-imminent harm to her fetus, but a powerful and often positive
influence on her child even before it’s born. And pregnancy is not a
nine-month wait for the big event of birth, but a crucial period unto
itself — “a staging period for well-being and disease in later life,” as
one scientist puts it.
Editor’s note. Mr. Stark is Communications Associate for Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, NRLC’s state affiliate
Source: NRLC News
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