There's a wonderful quote in Anne Murphy Paul's new book, Origins or How the Nine Months before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. It's taken from a book written in 1802 by an English physician, Thomas Browne. "Every man is some months older than he bethinks him."
For most of us, nine months to be exact.The life of the foetus in the womb (the child is called an embryo until the end of the first three months) has fascinated humankind ever since some unknown genius, thousands of years ago, noticed the association between the sexual act, the growth of the woman's belly and the birth of a baby, nine months later. What exactly went on in there?What does go on inside the womb?Some of the most fascinating research is now being done and the results, most of which date back only four or five years, in other words to the dark ages of the Manning administration, are beautifully summarised in Ms Paul's book, and may have striking consequences for the rest of us in the future, if this present government can get its affairs in some sort of order, now that the nine months of its pregnancy are over.
Some would say the baby born near death, the APGAR score well below 5 and at one month, breastfeeding is not going too well, the mother is always travelling and the child is not putting on weight.Time for a political TIBS? But really, the new science of fetal origins has began to change the way we think about the nine months before birth. For various reasons there has been a resurgence of interest in something called, "the fetal origins of disease. "It's now believed that many illnesses have their origin inside the womb. In medical school in the sixties, I was taught that the foetus sort of developed regardless of what the mother did or ate or thought.That was just after the thalidomide disaster which was the "smoking gun" that made physicians pay closer attention to the intimate relationship between mother and unborn child, a relationship that we now believe goes both ways, the mother influencing the child and the child influencing the mother.
"Pregnancy grows not just a baby but a mother."
Pregnancy is as much a developmental phase as is adolescence, in which the psyche changes as well as the body. The difference before and after a woman has had a baby can be astounding, to the chagrin of many a young man who may begin to wonder where the young girl he married has gone and if he does not rapidly mature, a process too many men find impossible to do, he'll soon leave, a victim of the Peter Pan syndrome, known in town, as a Queen's Park Oval saga boy. Research under way now shows that every time the foetus moves in the womb (about once a minute from around five months of gestation), the mother receives a jolt to her nervous system, even when she is unaware that her foetus was moving.It's as if the baby is reaching out to teach the mother to respond to her needs after she is born.
That relationship between mother and child is strong, brother, and is the basis of all our relationships in the future. It's fascinating to think that the relationship begins in utero. Equally as fascinating, however, are the old wives' tales about the nine months of pregnancy, which if not true, attest to the long-held belief that what the mother does can affect her unborn baby. For many centuries and in many cultures and still today in T&T, people believe that a shocking sight or strong passion experienced by a pregnant woman would impress itself on her baby in the form of a birthmark or other physical anomaly.A variation of that is the one that says that a woman whose mind wandered during intercourse might bear an infant who looked more like her lover than her husband.Yes, of course.
Or women with strong cravings would have a child with a birthmark in the shape of a fruit or other food.
As a soon to be grandfather, again, the question of fetal sex always come up and myriad are the ways of choosing or determining the sex. In ancient Greece, this meant lying on one's right side during copulation; in eighteenth century France it meant binding up the man's left testicle before intercourse and as recently as in the last century in Italy, it meant biting the woman's right ear during sex. Trust the Italians to think that one up. Indicators of the sex of the foetus are rampant and everyone has their favourite yarn, usually passed down from grandmother to grandchild. Morning sickness means it's a girl; a big appetite, a boy. A woman favours her right side when she is pregnant with a boy; her left side with a girl. And there's always the old shibboleth, a quiet foetus is female, a vigorous one, male. In a couple of years we might know more about all this.