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In 1896, inventor Martin Cooney designed the incubator, a device veloped to aid premature babies. Cooney was the first to advocate separation of infants from their mothers as a medical procedure for the health of the child. In a bizarre combination of medicine and sideshow. Cooney gathered hundreds of premature babies…
Seizing on yet another natural experiment, Almond examined the impact of the introduction of the food-stamp program in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The program was rolled out on a state-by-state basis, allowing Almond to compare birth outcomes for poor women who received food assistance during pregnancy to those…
Initially, Almond doubted that the intrauterine conditions provided by a pregnant woman, even one sick with a virulent strain of the flu, could exert any lasting influence on her offspring. “When I started looking at the influenza pandemic, I was skeptical of the fetal origins hypothesis. I didn’t think I’d find any…
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…
The creation of public programs to improve the health of women and babies began in nineteenth-century Europe, where governments found themselves in need of robust young men to fight their wars and expand their empires. Following a crushing defeat in the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, for example, France set up a series of…
And: Eating a lot of fish during pregnancy seems to produce smarter kids. A study of 135 Project Viva mothers and their six-month-old babies, published in 2005 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that greater fish consumption during pregnancy was associated with better infant cognition. The highest…
May conducted a study of the effects of maternal exercise on the fetus. Comparing sedentary pregnant women to those who engage in moderate-intensity aerobic exercise for at least thirty minutes three times a week, May found that fetuses show the same beneficial effects of cardiovascular training as do their physically…
Williamson’s wise advice went unheeded. In the years after her study was published in 1978, ultrasound became increasingly available in Singapore and other countries in South and East Asia. The introduction of this technology enabled a new and brutal form of sex selection: if the sonogram shows it’s a girl, abort…
A stress-related decline in the sex ratio is no anomaly, but a biological mechanism that evolved to keep the species going, according to Ralph Catalano, professor of public health at the University of California, Berkeley. “From an evolutionary perspective, in stressful eras it’s a smarter bet to have a female child…
There’s no doubt that seeing one’s future child on an ultrasound monitor is a powerful experience, the first visual evidence of the fetus in a culture in which seeing is believing. The encounter can be so compelling, in fact, that some medical providers are using it not just as a diagnostic tool, but as a treatment in…
anything labeled with the recycling code three, six, or seven goes into the trash. (In my research on BPA, I encountered a mnemonic device with the lilt of a nursery rhyme: “Four, five, one, and two/All the rest are bad for you.”)
In fact, an early clue to the potential risks posed by plastic was discovered entirely by accident. In August of 1998, Washington State University geneticist Patricia Hunt found herself baffled by an unexpected development in her lab. Hunt was using experiments on lab mice to explore why the eggs of older women are…
“During most of pregnancy, the placenta separating mother and fetus is only one cell thick,” Koren tells me. “But it has an array of mechanisms to help it do its job of protecting the fetus.” These subcellular tools, he explains, include tiny pumps that expel toxins before they can do any damage, immune agents that…
“Make your plate colorful,” she had advised, and the late-summer bounty makes that easy: into the cart go red tomatoes (full of beneficial carotenoids), orange yams (rich in vitamin A), and green spinach (lots of calcium and iron). Eating a variety of fruits and vegetables of different colors, Michels had explained…
Williams’s experiments have shown that the offspring of mice who ingest a phytochemical derived from cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, and brussels sprouts during pregnancy were much less likely to get cancer, even when exposed to a known carcinogen. The same is true of the offspring of mice who were…
I dive deep into the research, its strong currents pushing me first one way—fish is good!—and then the other—mercury is bad!—and finally surface with a seemingly obvious conclusion: eat fish, lots of it, just not the mercury-laden kind. This is harder than it sounds. Fish, to me, has meant a pink slab of tuna steak or…
Twenty-six years ago I noticed that our clearheaded, undrugged mothers, who were not strapped down or restrained in any way, eagerly, with mothedy murmurs of joy, reached out to grasp and hold their babies as I placed them on their abdomens. Why not let them hold their babies? I have heard many absurd objections over…
What are other benefits of breast-feeding? Let's consider a few. We think the Creator intended that your wife should not have an immediate return of her menstrual bleeding after having a baby. She has donated blood to the baby itself (not directly but via the ingredients), and she then loses some incident to its…
What, then, is the difference between human and other animals? Are their bodies made differently? As a matter of fact they are remarkably similar. Cat and dog bodies are used in premedical anatomy studies due to the similarity of structures with identical name and function. Is it that they just can't experience pain?…
The historians of the future will undoubtedly look back upon our recent past era and refer to it as the "drug" era. The Pharmaceutical Manufacturer's Association estimates that ten thousand types of drugs are being manufactured in this country. We are the pill-takingest people the earth has ever known. Sir William…