Читать книгу Shadows of Belonging - Ron Rockey - Страница 5

Do you think that your beginning occurred in the delivery room and began the moment you gasped your first breath? You might have been born, like Ron was, in an attic, or even in the back seat of a car on the way to a hospital, but your first breath, wherever you gasped it, was not really when you began.

In his wonderfully informative books, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child and Pre-Parenting - Nurturing Your Child from Conception, Dr. Thomas Verny writes about the experience of a child in the womb. Dr. Verny is a psychiatrist, who earned his doctorate at the University of Toronto, and has taught at several Ivy-League Universities. He is the founder of the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health and has lectured extensively throughout Europe and North America and has appeared frequently on national television shows. During his years of research, he has discovered many valuable things about the life and development of the child growing in the womb.

Did you know that at 18 to 22 days after your conception, your heart was beating, bringing life to you – and you were just the size of a grain of rice? In those first few hours and days after conception, the fertilized ovum (egg) begins the rapid division into multiple cells, until a form of the human body begins to develop. Easily seen shortly after conception are the spinal column and chord, the brain (much larger in proportion to the body than it will be later on) and the base of the brain (known as the medulla oblongata). It is the center for developing and operating all the emerging body systems that provide functions necessary to sustain life.

The October 4, 2010 issue of TIME Magazine reports other new findings about life in the womb and its effect on the fetus, newborn and developing child and later adult.

“The kind and quantity of nutrition you received in the womb; the pollutants, drugs and infections you were exposed to during gestation; your mother’s health, stress level and state of mind while she was pregnant with you – all these factors shaped you as a baby and a child and continue to affect you to this day.”

“This is the provocative contention of a field known as fetal origins, whose pioneers assert that the nine months of gestation constitute the most consequential period of our lives, permanently influencing the wiring of the brain and the functioning of organs such as the heart, liver and pancreas. The conditions we encounter in utero, they claim, shape our susceptibility to disease, our appetite and metabolism, our intelligence and temperament. In the literature which has exploded over the past 10 years, you can find references to the fetal origins of cancer, asthma, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, mental illness – even of conditions associated with old age like arthritis, osteoporosis and cognitive decline.”

Catherine Monk, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, has advanced an even more startling proposal: that a pregnant woman’s mental state can shape her offspring’s psyche. “Research indicates that even before birth, mother’s moods may affect child development,” Monk says.

Women’s heart rate and blood pressure, or their levels of stress hormones, could affect the inter-uterine milieu over the nine months of gestation, Monk explains, influencing an individual’s first environment and thereby shaping its development.

“We know that some people have genetic predispositions to conditions like depression and anxiety,” Monk says. “And we know that being raised by a parent with mental illness can increase the risk of mental illness in the offspring. It may be that the intrauterine environment is a third pathway by which mental illness is passed down in families. This kind of research,” says Monk, “is pushing back the starting line for when we become who we are.”

In his book Pre-Parenting, Dr. Verny reports that former Harvard professor, Chicago Radiologist, Jason Birnholz, has prepared over fifty thousand fetal sonograms over the past two decades. One of the most dramatic findings for Birnholz has been that unborn babies, especially beyond the fourth month of pregnancy, are not all that different from newborns.

“You can see the emotional reactions on the fetus’s face”, says Birnholz. “If they look unhappy, there is probably a reason. I’ve seen starving fetuses cry just like newborns. They used to be considered blobs, but they are not.”

In the forward of his best-selling book, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, Dr. Verny states,

“We now know that the unborn child is an aware, reacting human being who from the sixth month on (and perhaps even earlier) leads an active emotional life.”

Reading further on pages 12 and 13, he sites the following discoveries:

•“The fetus can see, hear, experience, taste and, on a primitive level, even learn in utero (that is in the uterus before birth). Most importantly, he can feel – not with an adult’s sophistication, but feel nonetheless.”

•“A corollary to this discovery is that what a child feels and perceives, begins shaping his attitudes and expectations about himself. Whether he ultimately sees himself and, hence, acts as a happy or sad, aggressive or meek, secure or anxiety ridden person depends, in part, on the messages he gets about himself in the womb.”

•“The chief source of shaping those messages is the child’s mother. This does not mean that every fleeting worry, doubt or anxiety a woman has rebounds on her child. What matters are deep, persistent patterns of feeling. Chronic anxiety or a wrenching ambivalence about motherhood can leave a deep scar on an unborn child’s personality. On the other hand, such life-enhancing emotions as joy, elation and anticipation can contribute significantly to the emotional development of a healthy child.”

•“New research is also beginning to focus on the father’s feelings. Until recently his emotions were disregarded. Our latest studies indicate that this view is dangerously wrong. They show that how a man feels about his wife and unborn child is one of the single most important factors in determining the success of a pregnancy.”

Be assured that Dr. Verny has extensive experience and has done considerable research in preparing his writings. This has been his lifetime work. He states that in assembling his books, he visited, compared research and consulted with psychiatrists, psychologists, physiologists, fetologists, obstetricians and pediatricians in London, Paris, Salzburg, Berlin, Nice, Rome, Vienna, New York, Boston, San Francisco, New Orleans and Honolulu. Also, he conducted several research projects of his own and treated hundreds of patients affected by traumatic pregnancies or deliveries. His book is the product of six years of intensive study.

According to a large team of expert neurologists and audiologists, Dr. Verny reports that:

“ . . . there is hard, incontestable physiological evidence that the fetus is a hearing, sensing, feeling being and what happens to him, what happens to all of us in the nine months between conception and birth, molds and shapes personality, drives and ambitions in very important ways.” Ibid., page 15.