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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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