Fetal Origins
Please note that the content contained in these pages are my personal notes from my readings.
Fetal Origins is a burgeoning field of research whose pioneers assert that the nine months of gestation constitute the most consequential period of our lives, permanently influencing the wiring of the brain and the functioning of organs such as the heart, liver and pancreas. The conditions we encounter in utero, they claim, shape our susceptibility to disease, our appetite and metabolism, our intelligence and temperament. In the literature on the subject, which has exploded over the past 10 years, you can find references to the fetal origins of cancer, cardiovascular disease, allergies, asthma, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, mental illness — even of conditions associated with old age like arthritis, osteoporosis and cognitive decline.
– “How the First Nine Months Shape the Rest of Your Life” by Annie Murphy Paul,
Time Magazine, Wednesday, Sep. 22, 2010
“The evidence in support of this new view of the prenatal period is arriving from a number of disciplines and a variety of types of investigations. There are animal experiments, in which variables can be tightly controlled and manipulated. There is epidemiological research, in which patterns emerge from the study of very large groups of people. There are studies based on so-called experiments of nature: real-world events that create fortuitous circumstances for investigation. There are economic analyses, produced by a growing number of economists who have turned their attention to the costs and benefits generated by prenatal experience. There is epigenetic research, an exciting new approach that examines how the behavior of genes is altered by the environment — modifications that are made without changing DNA, and that occur with special frequency in the prenatal period. And there is groundbreaking fetal research, carried out in the laboratory with the cooperation of pregnant women.”
– How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (2010) by Annie Murphy Paul;
pages 4 – 5
“The fetus, we now know, is not an inert being — “the larval stage of human development,” in the wry words of one fetal origins researcher — but an active and dynamic creature, responding and even adapting to conditions inside and outside its mother’s body as it readies itself for life in the particular world it will soon enter.”
– How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (2010) by Annie Murphy Paul;
page 5
“Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life — the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the emotions she feels, the chemicals she’s exposed to — are shared in some fashion with her fetus…
The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood. And, often, it does something more: it treats these maternal contributions as information, as 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? 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’ brain and other organs are part of what give humans their impressive flexibility, their ability to thrive in environments as varied as the snow-swept tundra, the golden-grassed savanna — and the limestone canyons of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.”
– How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (2010) by Annie Murphy Paul;
pages 5 – 6
