What babies learn before birth

Lorraine, Jane and "Britt" in the early 90s. We are all so happy.

What do babies learn from their mothers in utero? Apparently quite a bit. Scientists are finding that even the inflection of a baby's cry correlates to the sounds of their native tongue and that food preferences are instilled in the womb.

While the debate at an earlier blog post over whether giving up a child for adoption imparts an initial shock that psychologist and author Nancy Verrier has called a Primal Wound raged on, I heard the end of a TED talk on NPR. What I learned was that biologists continue to collect information proving how much a mother's diet, her voice, her speech, her mental health and general well-being influences the fetus, and thus--her baby!


LEARNED FOOD PREFERENCES
Annie Murphy Paul, a scientist and a mother, said that food likes and dislikes are imparted to babies before they are born because the taste of what the pregnant woman eats ultimately goes through the amniotic sac and reaches the baby, influencing the taste of what he will like later. In one study, a group of pregnant women drank a lot of carrot juice, while another group had water. After their babies were born, the group that had been "fed" the taste of carrots preferred carrot juice mixed with their cereal, and from the looks on their faces, they seemed to enjoy it more than the plain cereal. The water-fed babies showed no added preference for the carrot cereal.

But, I said to myself, carrots have a high sugar content, maybe the carrot babies were responding to that. The next sentence countered that objection to the study swiftly. Babies in Dijon, France whose mothers consumed a lot of food and drink flavored with anise--think of licorice--discovered that those babies on the first day of birth preferred that flavor. Anise is a strong, odd flavor that even adults have to get used to. Yet the babies were given anise a second time, four days later and still showed the same marked preference. 

But babies whose mothers had no anise-flavored food or drink during pregnancy responded with a reaction that can be roughly translated as yuck. As Annie Murphy Paul says in her TED talk: 

"What this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat. Fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they'll be joining through one of culture's most powerful expressions, which is food. They're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices even before birth."

When I heard this, I was reminded of the many Facebook postings of some Korean adoptees about their beloved kimchi, a fermented cabbage. I've never had kimchi, and clearly a lot of Korean adoptees love it. I however did grow up liking sauerkraut (a fermented cabbage also) and Polish sausage, and it's a fair bet that my mother, whose parents came from Poland, ate a lot of that when I was in utero. Today I have a marked preference for all things cabbage: stuffed cabbage or golumpki as they are known in Polish, sauerkraut or kapusta, coleslaw, even a more modern version of a cabbage dish, purple cabbage sauteed with orange juice.

My husband whose mother was of old American stock (he is descended from one of the witches hanged at Salem) and ate bland food as he tells it. He barely tolerates coleslaw unless it is slathered in mayo, and even then in limited quantities. As for kapusta, forget it! He's likely to pass me his coleslaw when we're out having burgers--as well as his pickle--which I am happy to eat. Need I add that Poles eat a lot of pickles? I remember one of my relatives brining their own cucumbers.

And as for the anise, we have one friend whose parents were both French. He is the only person I know who goes into a bar and asks for Pernod on ice. For those who don't know, Pernod is flavored with anise. I find the taste unpleasant, medicinal.  

I'm going off on a tangent here, my comments are not in the least scientific, but they do back up this point about food preferences. What about your own experience?

THE SOUND OF A MOTHER'S VOICE
As for voices, newborns who heard a recording of their own mother's voice responded with interest--but did not respond to a female stranger's voice. This was determined by extrapolating from the fact that babies slow down their sucking when something else interests them, and resume their fast sucking when they are bored. Their own mother's voice was paid attention to; they ignored a strange woman's voice. Researchers discovered this when the newborns whose mothers who read Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat repeatedly out loud when they were pregnant recognized it. One of the more amusing examples of sound familiarity was that newborns responded to the theme music of the soap operas their mothers watched regularly during pregnancy.

Another startling finding was that babies cries mimic the inflection of a native tongue of the mother, and a difference can actually be heard in their cries--whether they end on an up note or down note. So we do not come into the world as tabula rasas, far from it. We come out shrieking in our mother's native tongue, prepared to eat the kind of food she has acclimated us to. To suddenly be with a stranger whose voice is odd to the baby's ears has to be some kind of shock.

None of of this means that Mozart for the fetus makes a classical pianist make or a mathematician, but it does mean that the total environment of the mother for the nine months of gestation does directly affect how the baby comes into the world. Murphy Paul says:

"Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life--the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels--are shared in some fashion with her fetus. They make up a mix of influences as individual and are as 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 as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside."

Those of us who gave up our children after a stressful pregnancy won't find this data comforting. I was told I wasn't pregnant (when I was), had a lousy diet, and then after I learned I was indeed pregnant at nearly five months, was wracked with sadness, suicidal thoughts, guilt, remorse, and a feeling of utter hopelessness. I can't help but think about my daughter, whose myriad problems, including epilepsy and depression, probably started with me.

WHAT IS THE 'RIGHT' THING?
Knowing what we do now, it's not reassuring to hear that we did the "right thing" in giving up our children. I didn't give my daughter a better life; she had a different life. In truth, I don't see how to excuse myself from recognizing that my baby was pierced to the heart of her existence by making "an adoption plan," three words strung together to make the reality seem much smoother, to whitewash that reality. Acceptance with equanimity is the best I can hope for even after all these years. Frequent readers know that my daughter, after many years of emotional ups and downs, committed suicide in 2007.

I am writing about it here today because it may reach some woman wrestling with the idea of whether or not to give up here baby.

Though the problems after giving up a child have been known for years, knowledge of them has been drowned out by the relentless call and celebration of adoption as a win-win. It is not a win-win for the natural mother, nor the child: it is making the best of a bad situation. But often adoption is seen as a panacea for mothers caught with untimely pregnancies and no help. Instead of figuring out where the help might come from, social workers offer hard questions about how are you going to do this, do that? drowning out the bonding that has occurred between mother and child. So today I get emails from people who gave up their babies in the recent past, or friends who are trying to help these sad women. Many want to know why they didn't know the aftermath would be as bad as it is turning out to be.

KEEP YOUR BABY
If you carry a baby to term, unless you are a junkie, incarcerated or about to be a danger to yourself or your baby, keep that baby. What seems impossible today may not be so tomorrow. Know that the child you give to others to raise may be the only child you will ever have. The percentage of "birth mothers" who do not have another child after surrendering one to be adopted is around 30 percent. Apparently for some the trauma of giving one up makes it impossible to consider having another, even to keep. Apparently the aftereffect--some consider it having all the hallmarks of PTSD--for some is great.

As for the babies, the data above alone informs us that being handed over to a stranger--no matter how well meaning--causes distress in their first days. What was familiar is now gone. Some will be less bothered than others. Some will be troubled a great deal.

For mother, for child, the old adage, time heals all wounds, does not apply here.

You outta see the scar.--lorraine
_________________________
Let's be civil with the comments, and let us also try not to be thin-skinned. When someone is truly open about their feelings, let us consider where they are coming from before we respond negatively.

FROM FMF
How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives

SOURCE
What we learn before we're born
TO READ
Hole In My Heart: memoir and report from the fault lines of adoption
by Lorraine Dusky

"Lorraine Dusky's riveting memoir about her journey to find her birth daughter was both inspiring and heartbreaking. With passion and a sense of righteous indignation she gives us a concise history of adoption and its practices and the fight for reform by birth mothers, adoptees and others in the past few decades. With no small risk to herself Ms. Dusky put herself at the forefront of this political battle and met her birth daughter at a time when this was rarely done. As an adoptive mother I have learned so much about adoption in general, from this book and also from the political movement that has arisen from the pain of birth mothers and their children and am grateful to them. 

"I enjoyed reading about the mother-daughter relationship and seeing how similar they were to each other; both strong, stubborn, fragile and of course, their differences. The relationship was fraught with its ups and downs which is not unusual given that many mother-daughters relationships can be rocky and given their own particular circumstances. Sometimes I felt concern for each of them; empathy for Ms. Dusky when her Jane, daughter would willy-nilly stop speaking to her and concern for Jane when Ms. Dusky sometime had a hard time listening to who Jane was and what she needed if it didn't fit her agenda (the adoption of her grandchild). Yet, overall I was overwhelmed by their connection and love and fierceness. I will make sure to recommend this unforgettable book."--Adoptive mother at Amazon.

THANK YOU FOR ORDERING ANYTHING THROUGH THE PORTAL OF FMF. TO GO THERE, JUST CLICK ON THE TITLES OR BOOK JACKETS.

Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity
by Catana Tully

"This is the compelling life story of a young Carib child, torn from her roots in an obscure coastal town and raised by wealthy German expatriates in Guatemala City, who struggles throughout a lifetime to reconcile her European upbringing and white identity with her dark skin. Her story takes us on a multi-cultural journey from Central America and the Caribbean through Europe and then the United States, offering profound insight into the relativity of racial identity and cultural assumptions. The style of this autobiography is vivid, dramatic, and moving."--Reviewer at Amazon