Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives
Annie Murphy Paul
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0743296621
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
What makes us the way we are? Some say it’s the genes we inherit at conception. Others are sure it’s the environment we experience in childhood. But could it be that many of our individual characteristics—our health, our intelligence, our temperaments—are influenced by the conditions we encountered before birth?
That’s the claim of an exciting and provocative field known as fetal origins. Over the past twenty years, scientists have been developing a radically new understanding of our very earliest experiences and how they exert lasting effects on us from infancy well into adulthood. Their research offers a bold new view of pregnancy as a crucial staging ground for our health, ability, and well-being throughout life.
Author and journalist Annie Murphy Paul ventures into the laboratories of fetal researchers, interviews experts from around the world, and delves into the rich history of ideas about how we’re shaped before birth. She discovers dramatic stories: how individuals gestated during the Nazi siege of Holland in World War II are still feeling its consequences decades later; how pregnant women who experienced the 9/11 attacks passed their trauma on to their offspring in the womb; how a lab accident led to the discovery of a common household chemical that can harm the developing fetus; how the study of a century-old flu pandemic reveals the high personal and societal costs of poor prenatal experience.
Origins also brings to light astonishing scientific findings: how a single exposure to an environmental toxin may produce damage that is passed on to multiple generations; how conditions as varied as diabetes, heart disease, and mental illness may get their start in utero; why the womb is medicine’s latest target for the promotion of lifelong health, from preventing cancer to reducing obesity. The fetus is not an inert being, but an active and dynamic creature, responding and adapting as it readies itself for life in the particular world it will enter. The pregnant woman is not merely a source of potential harm to her fetus, as she is so often reminded, but a source of influence on her future child that is far more powerful and positive than we ever knew. And pregnancy is not a nine-month wait for the big event of birth, but a momentous period unto itself, a cradle of individual strength and wellness and a crucible of public health and social equality.
With the intimacy of a personal memoir and the sweep of a scientific revolution, Origins presents a stunning new vision of our beginnings that will change the way you think about yourself, your children, and human nature itself.
Laundry, 65 Great Britain, 6, 130 Great Leap Forward, 161–62, 204, 220 Greece, ancient, 110, 132, 173 green tea, 38 Guendelman, Sylvia, 71 guilt: inherited, 173 maternal, 148–50, 217 Haeckel, Ernst, 114–15, 124 hairspray, 99 Hamburg, University of, 80 Hanson, Clare, 123 Harding, Warren, 206 Harris, Robert Alton, 193 Harvard Medical School, 18, 26, 33, 37, 150, 184, 186, 192 Harvard School of Public Health, 235 Harvard University, 104, 207 Hata, Toshiyuki, 138–39 health:
“Did you hear they’re saying that pregnant women shouldn’t . . . ?” Always, it seems, the influence wielded by a pregnant woman is of a negative kind; always she is one slipup away from harming her fetus. Today’s pregnant woman could be forgiven for feeling that there’s a vast conspiracy afoot, bent on controlling her every action, stripping her of every pleasure, and inducing guilt at every turn. At least as strong as the urge to freak out is the impulse to dismiss it all as bunk, as cynical
missing some crucial nutrient. All that angst and confusion come surging back when I learn that I’m pregnant a second time. Once again, eating is no longer a simple bodily function, much less a pleasure to be savored; it’s a series of fraught choices, an act with grave consequences, committed three times a day. The questions tug at me every time I open a kitchen cabinet or gaze into the refrigerator: Is it true that what pregnant women put in their mouths can have an effect on their fetuses? What
assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a physician-scientist at Harvard’s Joslin Diabetes Center. “I always ask my patients what their birth weight was,” Patti tells me. “Patients are often surprised at the question—they’re expecting me to ask about their current lifestyle. But we know that low-birth-weight babies become adults with a higher risk of diabetes, so having that information gives me a more complete picture of their case.” Patti is now researching how information about
Meals (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), p. 2. 37 “Pregnancy is actually an ideal occasion for shaking up the way you think and feel about food”: Author interview with Karin Michels. 37 Michels feels so strongly about this that she wrote a book intended for pregnant women: Karin B. Michels and Kristine Napier, The Gift of Health: The Complete Pregnancy Diet for Your Baby’s Wellness—From Birth Through Adulthood (New York: Pocket, 2001). 38 “a number of chemicals that are protective against