How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives is a new book by Annie Murphy Paul, and merely the title sets up my hackles. That’s right, folks. Got a complaint about the way you are? Are you too fat? Not smart enough? Prone to high blood pressure? That’s somewhat because you have Snickers for lunch every day, never see a gym and didn’t crack a book in school, but it’s really because your mom breathed the wrong air and drank the wrong water while she was pregnant.
I am not joking.
Exhibit A: “…the lifestyle that influences the development of disease is often not only the one we follow as adults, but the one our mothers practiced when they were pregnant with us as well.”
Exhibit B: “The food the mother eats, the air she breathes, the water she drinks, the stress or trauma she experiences — all may affect her child, for better or worse, over the decades to come.”
I know that these statements don’t seem too irrational in and of themselves, but the argument they’re using them to develop throughout the article is spooky – don’t blame yourself, blame your mom. You can’t help the way you are.
The best part of the article comes when they point out that women who eat cereal every morning are more likely to have boys and so, “The fact that many young women of reproductive age skip breakfast or consume low-calorie diets in order to keep their weights down . . . could help explain the falling rate of male birth.”
Wait a minute. I don’t know about your high school biology class, but mine taught me that the gender of a baby is determined by whether or not the sperm that meets the egg carries an X or a Y chromosome, not whether or not the mother loves her some cornflakes. Or wait, maybe they’re suggesting that grain-fed ovums reject X-sperm and low-carb ovums reject Y-sperm. My eggs have bouncers at the cell wall that select who gets into Club Zygote based on what I ate for breakfast that morning.
Holy Gods, are we kidding?
When I talk about my desire to adopt a child, do you know the number one thing that people say to me? They say, “You don’t want to adopt a child; what happens in the first few years of life affects them permanently. You want to adopt an infant right at birth.” Right. We should give up on three-year-olds because of what their parents might or might not have done.
But apparently that’s not good enough anymore. We need to give up on somebody a few days after conception because their parents may have already screwed them up beyond repair with twinkies and beer. The fetus is clearly destined for diabetes and alcoholism – potentially with a damaged IQ and who knows what else.
I KNOW that’s not what she’s saying, but this is what I get told over and over. And it makes me mad. We need to focus on dealing with the lot we have and figuring out how to work with it – not on assigning blame. That leads to a host of bitter “what ifs” that do no one any good based on a science that is, at this point, little more than guesswork.
To close, I present you with different advice on pregnancy, also from the New York Times. Pick up that Drink. You just may make your baby a little smarter.
