How Little We Understand About Pregnancy and Birth
I can’t complain about my mother marrying too young (at nineteen) and then getting pregnant just about immediately, giving birth to me on April 6, 1937. But my mother was forced, as was often the situation for young women in those days, by marriage and motherhood, to give up dreams that would have taken her in a different direction. In my mother’s case, her aborted dream was to be a performer. She sang popular songs while accompanying herself on the piano and won talent contests conducted in local movie houses in Brooklyn, New York. But my grandparents, not unusual for that time, felt that allowing her to accept offers to go professional and play in public places that allowed drinking and dancing, was too dangerous for an innocent young woman. Depression poverty and marriage came along and my mother took a different path. I imagine her delight at becoming a mother, and her disappointment as her dream faded. Our home was full of her household performances. I grew up to the sounds of the jazz hits of the 1930s and 40s played on the radio and on our piano and sung by my mother. But, to this day, and through my entire life, one of these songs, “Oh, Lady be Good,” elicits in me a special feeling, which I am unable to give words to, and which is unique among all the differing feelings associated with all my experiences even to this time in my life, a feeling associated with loss, but not a loss I have any memory of experiencing. Written by George and Ira Gershwin in 1924, this song was composed in a manner allowing many interpretations, but only one of them has special meaning for me, a version sung by Ella Fitzgerald: (http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=21P0FX1vGmU)
Could it be that my mother’s loss of her dream of performance-fame was expressed by metaphor in song, where “Lady” likely stands in place for “Life,” a metaphor increasingly poignant as the progress of her pregnancy increasingly overwhelmed her dream? And did she listen to and sing this song many times during those nine months and feel that conflict and loss? It was one of the very most popular songs of 1936 and 1937. Did I hear this song, and somehow understand its mean- ing to her and her feelings, before I was born?
In the August 15 issue of Science, the pre-eminent magazine that reports on scientific progress, there is a 37 page section reporting research entitled: “Parenting – A legacy that transcends genes.” In other words, the legacy we give to our offspring goes beyond the genetic material derived from the mother’s egg and the father’s sperm. Here are some vignettes from this section.
Work at the Monell Chemicals Center in Philadelphia shows that excessive drinking during pregnancy leads to babies with an enhanced attraction to alcohol scented laced toys. From the University of Adelaide in Australia comes the discovery that rats born of mothers fed a junk food diet, had enhanced neural reward circuitry in their brains activated by eating junk food, compared to rats whose mothers ate a bland diet. Also from Adelaide is research demonstrating that the early embryo is exquisitely sensitive to the environment of the fertilized egg. In particular they show for mice, that deficiencies in the maternal diet within the first three days after conception can lead to higher blood pressure and increased anxiety after birth while inflammation in the mother, such as from a flu infection, during the same early period leads to pups with abnormally increased body fat and reduced capacity for exploration. In related studies from the United Kingdom, researchers report a small increased risk of certain disorders during pregnancy and in the resulting newborns, which are conceived by in vitro fertilization, so-called test tube babies. In these procedures the first days of the develop- ing embryo are spent in an environment far different from nature’s intended state.
Here’s another: Maternal overfeeding in sheep leads to offspring with hypertension; and another from the same group: Male mice were first conditioned to respond to an odor connected to a fear stimulus and then allowed to mate. Their offspring responded in the same way to this odor, eliciting fear. Here is more from the National Institutes of Health and the University of California in San Francisco which show that premature birth, the second most common cause of death for children below the age of 5, is associated with heavy workload, anxiety and depression in pregnant women. The biological basis of the connection is not understood but clearly a woman’s emotional situation is somehow connected to her pregnancy.
The research noted here and so much more leaves little doubt of how little we understand about the path from conception to birth but little question that the parent’s state, environmental, emotional and physiological, has much input. Add this, to the known fact that the unborn child, starting at 16 weeks from conception, begins to hear with increasing fidelity as pregnancy proceeds to term, leading to the likely possibility that my strange connection to “Oh, Lady be Good” is connected to my “experience” before April 6, 1937 and to my mother’s feelings during this critical period in her young life. Perhaps you have an experience with a song like mine. Check this out: http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/ whatresearchwomb.asp
