Unsolicited Advice For Pregnant Women

A pregnant woman is a ready target for a wide range of well-meant but unasked-for instruction. Even in today’s very medically oriented society, superstitions about pregnancy abound. Few pregnant women have escaped the warnings of well-wishers who caution them against going swimming, reaching up to high shelves, wearing high heels, indulging in intercourse, eating certain foods, and so on. The list is apparently end­less. Many claim to be able to predict the sex of the fetus by gazing into the eyes of the mother to be or by looking at the shape of the bulge, or through a variety of other mysterious ways. Pregnancy is a very public state and even strangers do not hesitate to communicate their prediction the mother. Of course they are correct about 50 percent of the time.The best way to handle advice that you readily recognize as pure superstition is to listen to it politely and then follow the dictates of your own common sense. Remember that there is no truth to the old tale that port wine stains or strawberry marks, which are actually diffuse collections of blood vessels within the skin, are produced by experiences of the mother during pregnancy. But it has been scientifically proven that the baby does experience events in the world outside the uterus and after birth can remember sights and especially sounds experienced in the late months before birth. A baby may be born knowing the rhythm of his or her mother’s voice through hearing it repeatedly while in utero. Sensitive fetuses can even learn a melody this way. Evidence exists that the higher centers of the fetal brain are working in the last trimester, or last three months, of pregnancy. There is no evidence, however, that visual, auditory, or other sensory stimuli received by the mother during pregnancy can cause any physical changes in the fetus.

Women also love to tell pregnant women their own birth stories. Unfortunately, too many women whose births are normal feel that their stories are too boring to tell or that once the baby came, nobody was interested in their experience anymore. This means that often we don’t hear birth stories until we are pregnant and that most birth stories we do hear are the ones in which something went terribly wrong. A pregnant woman today could easily get the feeling that birth is a very scary and dangerous event, when in fact most births are totally normal. Ask women who do not volunteer their birth stories to tell them to you. Most often they will be reassuring and medically uneventful, but there will be something to learn in them. Do not try to plan your birth, however, on any­one else’s. Each birth is different-even for the same women.