Prenatal Influences as Information for the Fetus

The notion of prenatal influences may conjure up frivolous attempts to enrich the fetus, like playing Mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly. In reality, the nine-month-long process of shaping and molding that goes on in the womb is far more visceral and consequential than that. 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. They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. 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 asinformation, 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’s 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.

Diet and other environmental factors are data for the fetus about the conditions of the world outside the womb and influence its development to be best adapted to that environment.