When you’re newly pregnant for the first time, you find yourself faced with an overwhelming number of things you should and should not be doing during pregnancy, and at times different sources say different and even conflicting things. Since it’s a totally new experience, you want to do everything “right” for your baby, but it can be trying to keep up with all the guidelines and opinions that are being pushed towards you from every which direction. Don’t drink alcohol and coffee, don’t smoke, don’t eat raw fish, don’t eat deli meat, don’t eat fish that could contain mercury; do take your prenatal vitamins, eat healthy, exercise in moderation… most of this is common knowledge today. We’re fortunate that we live in an age where we know how so many of our actions and what we put in our bodies can affect the fetus (two generations ago, expectant mommies were smoking and drinking away — can you believe it?) so that we can take preventative measures during pregnancy, but it does get a bit stressful to constantly have to be paranoid and second-guessing yourself with every thing you drink, eat, and do during those nine months.
Some of my girlfriends and I were talking about pregnancy this past weekend, and a couple of them recommended an article that was recently the cover story for TIME Magazine. Titled Fetal Origins: How The First Nine Months Can Shape the Rest of Your Life, it was a really interesting article about how researchers have been finding evidence that our susceptibility to and predisposition to certain diseases and conditions that often don’t appear until much later in life — such as heart disease, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, mental illness, and depression — can be traced back to our fetal origins: the first nine months of our lives, which we spent in our mothers’ wombs. It’s widely accepted that the environment and diet you are raised with as a young child has a significant bearing on whether or not you’ll have some of these conditions later in life, but I was surprised to find out that the fate of your health can be traced to even further back in your developmental life. Two decades ago, the hypothesis was scoffed and laughed at, but there’s been a lot of research and findings since then that have come to support this theory, and it’s now causing a revolutionary shift in science which brings pregnancy into the forefront as a critical time in which an individual’s lifelong health may be determined.
The effect your pregnancy has on the unborn baby goes much further beyond some of the more trivial things that baby-obsessed expectant mothers concern themselves with:
The notion of prenatal influence may conjure up frivolous attempts to enrich the fetus: playing Mozart to a pregnant belly and the like. In reality, the shaping and molding that goes on in utero is far more visceral and consequential than that. 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 — is shared in some fashion with her fetus. The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood.
Often it does something more: it treats these maternal contributions as information, biological postcards from the world outside. What a fetus is absorbing in utero is not Mozart’s Magic Flute but the answers to questions much more 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?
I encourage those who are interested to read the entire article, but it goes on to cite examples of how some of the poorest regions of England were prone to cardiovascular diseases (which is traditionally associated with an affluent background), because of malnutrition during pregnancy that led to infants being born with weakened hearts. Areas that are marked by air pollution caused their inhabitants to often produce babies that were born prematurely or with heart malformations. The mother’s exposure to carcinogens can also increase their child’s predisposition to cancer later in life. Obesity and heavy weight gain during pregnancy has been linked to the child facing weight problems and Type 2 diabetes years later; abnormal levels of stress and anxiety experienced by the mother can also cause their kids to be susceptible to mental illness and depression in their older years.
My best friend sent me an article from the New York Times a few weeks ago that also talked about how fetal origins can determine an individual’s course in life, but it was more general, bringing in educational attainment and success in society into the picture — but the basic premise is the same; that stress encountered in the womb can put a child at a disadvantage much later in life, and it shows that the repercussions stretch beyond health conditions:
Perhaps the most striking finding is that a stressful uterine environment may be a mechanism that allows poverty to replicate itself generation after generation. Pregnant women in low-income areas tend to be more exposed to anxiety, depression, chemicals and toxins from car exhaust to pesticides, and they’re more likely to drink or smoke and less likely to take vitamin supplements, eat healthy food and get meticulous pre-natal care.
The result is children who start life at a disadvantage — for kids facing stresses before birth appear to have lower educational attainment, lower incomes and worse health throughout their lives. If that’s true, then even early childhood education may be a bit late as a way to break the cycles of poverty.
Some may find all this depressing, to find that one’s future can be so heavily affected from before they even have a chance to step out into the world, but overall, I think all of the research on fetal origins is fascinating and exciting. In the TIME article, a researcher envisions a future in which expectant mothers in will be prescribed supplements that will protect their children from getting cancer. The more we know about how life and development in the uterine environment can influence and shape our children’s future, the more we will be able to prepare and protect them to have fuller, healthier lives.