Origins: How the Nine MOnths Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives

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Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives by Annie Murphy Paul

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


You know, it is hard to find relevant books when you are really interested in gestation but not at all interested in babies. I frequently find myself in conversations these days with one of my compatriots in Project Make a Baby Like a Boss that go something like, “blah something something childhood development blah, what do you think?” And I go, “not my department – hey, have you read that cool stuff about omega 3 intake in the first trimester correlated with better labor outcomes?”*

This one is pretty close, though as usual I would have honestly preferred a textbook over popular science. There’s a lot of pretty great stuff here. The sections on the perinatal transmission of vulnerability to PTSD were particularly striking, and I was delighted to finally come across a sensible biological explanation for the finding that the more older brothers a boy has, the more likely he is to be gay. None of this creepy Freudian incestuous homoeroticism bullshit, thank you.

Still, there just isn’t all that much to epigenetics to talk about yet. Insert joke about a science in the embryonic stages here. And while Paul writes a good survey, all her shopping at Whole Foods, living in Manhattan, attending pre-natal meditation classes makes it pretty painful when she starts going on about the plight of poor mothers and the things “we” can do to make sure “they” have access to the sanitation/nutrition/medicine necessary for healthier gestation. It’s not that we need to force women to make healthy choices, you know, we just need to encourage it. Uh-huh. Said with the blithe ignorance of someone who’s never been on the wrong end of a government poverty program based in “science”, like I have.

*Personally, I think the way the four of us are dividing the labor on this one is brilliant, even if it’s dictated by medical necessity, since the people required to feed/care for the shrieking infant will not be the person who has just shoved a shrieking infant out through her v-hole. I’m just saying. Sensible.




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Comments

[cyphomandra]

My current government is also very big on the "personal choice! It's all personal choice!" approach, so chopping subsidies to child care and cutting welfare while announcing that parents will of course make the best decisions for their children is a favourite.

I think epigenetics is going to be really hard to get trial data on, given the setting, but it is fascinating (there's increasing amounts of observational data relevant to allergy development, for example). The donor egg forums are particularly keen on it, but I think also as a psychological coping mechanism.

Hope Project Make a Baby Like a Boss is going well for you! I am now in a new city with a new specialist, and trying a low-key then ramp up approach which has the advantage of starting with significantly cheaper drugs. No go last cycle, trying again.

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I think epigenetics is going to be really hard to get trial data on, given the setting, but it is fascinating (there's increasing amounts of observational data relevant to allergy development, for example). The donor egg forums are particularly keen on it, but I think also as a psychological coping mechanism.


Yeah. This book is partly about how the large scale data we get is basically all from tragedies -- famines, mass terror, short-lived but profound loss of expected services like electricity, and the differing impacts based on where in the gestational process the stress fell. Fascinating, if obviously depressing and frustrating.

As you might expect, the surrogacy forums don't really want to talk about this stuff at all. But I'm in a different situation/set of relationships from many of these people, and have been told frequently that I'm "not just an incubator," so *shrug*.

Hope Project Make a Baby Like a Boss is going well for you! I am now in a new city with a new specialist, and trying a low-key then ramp up approach which has the advantage of starting with significantly cheaper drugs. No go last cycle, trying again.

We are in a legal/admin holding pattern for another 2-3 months, approximately, and then it will be go go go! I thought all this preliminary waiting and stuff would drive me insane and feel like forever, but my God, two months? That's like now almost, aaaaah!

Thumbs up on the new protocol. My doc has a strict 'if it hasn't worked after 2-3 tries, shake it up' mentality, which I appreciate. I assume you've looked into the extramedical nutrative things you can do about egg quality? In addition to CoQ10 and the other obvious things, I mean. I have been having noticeably good results with smallish supplementation and dietary tweaks, for my different hormone issues. But I don't know much about what you can and can't do while you're stimming.

Then again, someone I know in her late 30's with low AMH/poor responding ovaries was just finally successful on try 4 (or try 3, depending on if you count the canceled cycle). She wrote this post about what she'd done differently that time, but the bottom line was nothing, really. She just ate lots of protein and tried to relax, but she'd always done that. It just . . . happened to work that time. Kind of maddening, really.

I will be thinking of you, and -- okay, I have to back up and explain this. My sister and I were talking recently about some of the women we know who are ttc, and how some of the things they say sound so awful and stressful. Like lying on the table and crying about the money, or lying there and saying affirmations like "I will get pregnant." So we agreed that instead of any of that, I will lie on the table and read gay porn, because that seems so much better to both of us.

So I will read gay porn for your embryos.

[cyphomandra]

So I will read gay porn for your embryos.

Awww. I am touched! So much more sensible than meditating on flowers - and, hopefully, more effective, given the amount of gay porn I am also getting through. I will dedicate some in your direction as well.

Should be starting clomiphene shortly, and then a scan a week after that. Currently I'm just taking high dose vitamin D (and the obligatory folic acid, although my dog chewed the lid off of the bottle and I should probably find a replacement), as I felt a bit like once I started taking additional supplements I probably wouldn't stop.

And thanks for the encouraging story. Friend of a friend just had her first baby at 43 via donor egg, as well, so it's still hovering there.

(oh, and speaking of gay porn - do you want an ebook of Marie Sexton's Strawberries for Dessert? Contemporary m/m, and I really like what it does with families and stereotypes, as well as romance. Also, great food values.

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Thumbs up on the Clomid (same thing, just different name here). That's also what I'll be taking. I assume the idea is to go for quality over quantity, which sounds sensible from my lay perspective. Also, so very much easier on you.

I hear you on the supplementation. I started to go a little crazy about it, but then my acupuncturist was like, "you know, you can do pretty much all of this by eating more fish and other proteins," and I was like "....oh."

I actually have Strawberries for Dessert already. Will bump it up the list -- books about food are a definite yay.

[readerjane]

I've often thought that 3-4 months of nausea, followed by 5-6 months of increasing fatigue, followed by hours of pain and intense physical labor, followed by the whiplash of a Full Hormonal Reversal, does not prepare one at ALL well to nurture a tiny, helpless creature which is by its nature entirely selfish.

Your division of labor sounds brilliant to me.

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Exactly! J said that when we finally committed and all said yes, she was expecting to have a big wave of grief to deal with. That she'd actually "given up" on conceiving and carrying herself, and that she wasn't going to experience it. Then a few days later she was all, "actually . . . I was relieved. Text me the first time you get nauseous, ahahaha!"

Sisters.