Prenatal Influence
“To leave in the world a creature better than its parent: this is
the purpose of right motherhood.”
CHARLOTTE GILMAN: _Women and Economics_.
On the power of the mother directly to influence her child while it
is still unborn, diametrically opposite opinions have been expressed,
and without exaggeration I think one may safely say that the tendency
of biological science has been to scout the idea as “old wives’ tales”
and incredible superstition. Fortunate indeed it is that though our
immature and often blundering science has in many ways permeated and
influenced our lives, yet this denial of profound truth by those
incapable of handling it in the true terms of science, has not entirely
barred this avenue of power to the mother. Fortunately there are
innumerable children who owe their physical and spiritual well-being to
the profound racial knowledge still dormant in the true woman. As I
said when I touched upon this question in _Married Love_:--
Yet all the wisest mothers whom I know vary only in the degree
of their belief in this power of the mother. All are agreed in
believing that the spiritual and mental condition and environment
of the mother does profoundly affect the character and spiritual
powers of the child.
Alfred Russel Wallace, the great naturalist and co-discoverer with
Darwin of the principle of Evolution, was in many respects a pioneer
of unusual foresight and penetrating observation, who thought that
the transmission of mental influence from the mother to the child was
neither impossible nor even very improbable. In 1893 he published a
long letter detailing cases, which he prefaced by saying:--
The popular belief that prenatal influences on the mother affect
the offspring physically, producing moles and other birth-marks,
and even malformations of a more or less serious character, is
said to be entirely unsupported by any trustworthy facts, and it
is also rejected by physiologists on theoretical grounds. But I
am not aware that the question of purely mental effects arising
from prenatal mental influences on the mother has been separately
studied. Our ignorance of the causes, or at least of the whole
series of causes, that determine individual character is so great,
that such transmission of mental influences will hardly be held to
be impossible or even very improbable. It is one of those questions
on which our minds should remain open, and on which we should be
ready to receive and discuss whatever evidence is available; and
should a _primâ facie_ case be made out, seek for confirmation
by some form of experiment or observation, which is perhaps less
difficult than at first sight it may appear to be.
In one of the works of George or Andrew Combe, I remember a
reference to a case in which the character of a child appeared to
have been modified by the prenatal reading of its mother, and the
author, if I mistake not, accepted the result as probable, if not
demonstrated. I think, therefore, that it will be advisable to make
public some interesting cases of such modification of character
which have been sent me by an Australian lady in consequence
of reading my recent articles on the question whether acquired
characters are inherited. The value of these cases depends on their
differential character. Two mothers state that in each of their
children (three in one case and four in the other) the character
of the child very distinctly indicated the prenatal occupations
and mental interests of the mother, though at the time they were
manifested in the child they had ceased to occupy the parent, so
that the result cannot be explained by imitation. The second mother
referred to by my correspondent only gives cases observed in other
families which do not go beyond ordinary heredity.
... Changes in mode of life and in intellectual occupation are
so frequent among all classes that materials must exist for
determining whether such changes during the prenatal period have
any influence on the character of the offspring. The present
communication may perhaps induce ladies who have undergone such
changes, and who have large families, to state whether they
can trace any corresponding effect on the character of their
children.--_Nature_, August 24 1893, pp. 389, 390.
Yet this suggestive pronouncement of the world-famous naturalist has
never been seriously followed up by scientists.
I think the time is now ripe for a definite statement that: _The view
that the pregnant woman can and does influence the mental states of the
future child is to-day a scientific hypothesis which may be shortly
proved_. I make this definite statement, in conjunction with the
cognate and illuminating facts from other fields of research, a few of
which are discussed in the following pages.
That our mental states can affect, not only our spirits and our
points of view, but actually the physical structure of our bodies, is
demonstrable in a hundred different ways, and appears either to be
proved or merely suggested according to the bias and temperament of the
one to whom the demonstration is made. But there is one at least of
these physical correlations which can be demonstrated with scientific
thoroughness, and which proves beyond doubt that the mental state of
the mother _has_ a reaction upon her infant even after it has severed
its physical connection with her, and is a baby of a few months old.
This fact is that a nursing mother who is subjected to a violent shock
which results in a paroxysm of temper or of terror in her own mind,
conveys the physical result of this to her infant when next she nurses
it, so that the child has either an attack of indigestion or a fit.
The effect of the mother’s mental state is transmitted by the influence
on the milk, the chemical composition of which is subtly altered by her
nervous paroxysm, and which thus acts as a poison to the infant.
A much more subtle and closer correlation must exist between the
mother’s mental states and the child when it is still not yet free and
independent in the outer environment of the world but while it finds
in her body its entire environment, its protection and the resources
out of which it is building its own structure, while the blood and
the tissues of her body form its whole world, while through them and
through them alone can it obtain all its nourishment.
True, the result of the mental state of the mother which we can see
is, apparently, merely the physical result on the child’s digestion of
the milk which has become poisoned: but to stop at this point like a
jibbing mule, and to refuse to take the further step in the argument
because the child is yet too young for us to understand its resulting
mental states, which reason indicates must be correlated with its
poisoned digestive system, is to defraud the mind of the logical
conclusion of a sequence of ideas.
The argument is as follows:--
(_a_) The mother’s intense _mental_ experience and consequent nervous
paroxysm has a physical result upon the composition of her milk
(presumably, therefore, upon other portions of her body, though this is
irrelevant for the moment);
(_b_) This physically altered milk has a physical effect upon the
infant who shows other and more extreme forms of physical distress;
(_c_) This physical distress must obviously to some greater or lesser
degree, affect the child’s nervous system; and (which is the point
where the old-fashioned will break off);
(_d_) Consequently the child’s mental state will be affected--although
it is too young to translate this into conscious forms.
* * * * *
Were I to make this the main thesis of my book, examples of the effect
of mental states on bodily functions could be readily multiplied, and
illustrations drawn from facts quoted in other connections could be
found in a great number of medical works. I here bring together a few
which when placed in juxtaposition offer if not proof, yet such strong
support of my theme as to place it in the realm of the scientifically
ascertainable. For instance, Blair Bell in _The Sex Complex_, 1916,
says:--
Religious manias may lead to ideas which fill the patient with
abhorrence of sexual intercourse, and in this way directly
interfere with the genital functions. There is indeed no doubt
whatsoever that the mind influences function just as function
influences the mind; for example, it has been shown that fright
leads to an immediate increase in the output of suprarenin, and we
know well from constant clinical observations that hypothyroidism
leads to mental depression (pp. 209 and 210).
and Havelock Ellis in _The Psychology of Sex_, vol. 5, 1912, says:--
We can, again, as suggested by Féré, very well believe that the
maternal emotions act upon the womb and produce various kinds and
degrees of pressure on the child within, so that the apparently
active movements of the _fœtus_ may be really consecutive on
unconscious maternal excitations. We may also believe that, as
suggested by John Thomson, there are slight incoördinations _in
utero_, a kind of developmental neurosis, produced by some slight
lack of harmony of whatever origin and leading to the production
of malformations. We know, finally, that, as Féré and others have
repeatedly demonstrated during recent years by experiments on
chickens, etc., very subtle agents, even odors, may profoundly
affect embryonic development and produce deformity. But how the
mother’s psychic disposition can, apart from heredity, affect
specifically the physical conformation or even the psychic
disposition of the child within her womb must remain for the
present an insoluble mystery, even if we feel disposed to conclude
that in some cases such action seems to be indicated.
Direct evidence of the physical aspect of my thesis is found in the
fact quoted by Marshall in _The Physiology of Reproduction_, 1910, p.
566:--
So also it has been found that immunity from disease may be
acquired by young animals being suckled by a female which had
previously become immune, the antibody to the disease being
absorbed in the ingested milk.
Further argument upon these lines might well be brought forward in
favour of the view that the potential mother, during the months whilst
she is acting as the child’s total environment in all physical ways,
is also through her mental states and conditions affecting the child’s
ultimate mentality and artistic and spiritual powers.
This subtle control exerted over the formation of the child may be
visualized as more like some effect parallel to the remote influences
of the internal secretions in controlling the other organs of the body
than the more mechanical picture of things visualized by the Mendelians
and those who concentrate on the purely physical and material aspects
of heredity as related to chromosome structure.
The tendency in recent years in biological work has been far too
much to lay stress upon the curiously mathematical laws Mendel
discovered, and consequently to concentrate attention upon the physical
chromosomes as containing the factors which carry hereditary qualities.
Physiologists are now making an attempt to bring back into the
treatment of life a more rational outlook, and nothing has contributed
more to the scientific basis of this than the recent following up
of the suggestions made so long ago as 1869 by Brown-Séquard. Since
Starling named the internal secretions Hormones (see the Croonian
Lecture, 1905) they have been much discussed by physiologists and some
medical men (see for instance the recent work of Blair Bell, _The Sex
Complex_, 1916 already quoted).
To form a rough mental picture of what is happening one must combine
the physiological and the mechanical outlooks. One then obtains the
idea that the mother is, through her mental states, affecting and
to some extent controlling the production of the various internal
secretions, and other more subtle and still undetected influences
from various organs upon other organs, and that, in so doing she is
making the environment for the various hereditary factors, in which
their potentialities find it possible to develop or to be suppressed
according to the circumstances which she thus creates. As is now
beginning to be realized, we all have an immense number of latent
potentialities, which may lie dormant and develop only under suitable
circumstances.
Thus in my view the mother may actually and in every sense
fundamentally influence and control the character of her child, working
through the remote effects of internal secretions which play on the
complex material factors of hereditary qualities which form the
material basis of the child’s potentialities.
Thus both heredity and environment have a vital part to play in
building character, _but greater than either is the subtler environment
within the prospective mother created by her during the nine antenatal
months_.
Sometimes people who would otherwise like to believe that a mother has
this power, are deterred by their own experience or that of others, who
have, under conditions of distress and unfavourable circumstances, had
children whose dispositions seem not to have suffered, but appear as
sunny and happy as a child apparently conceived under more favourable
circumstances. Here, however, one is immediately faced by the
difficulties of accurate observation entailing a large number of data
which tend to cancel out; for the mother who may personally have been
below her usual standard of health and spirits while bearing the child
may, nevertheless, actually be in such a good physical condition, or be
a member of such a sound, healthy stock that the child’s heredity was
better than that of the average human being, and consequently that the
child itself was provided with a healthy well-run body.
While to contrast with it and apparently to refute my thesis, there
may be a mother full of the most ardent hopes and buoyant spirit,
looking forward with supreme joy to the advent of her baby, doing all
she can to give it every beautiful mental impression and physical
health, whose work may yet be undone by some cruel chance, such as
venereal infection, or some local malformation which has resulted in
weakness in, let us say, the child’s digestion. We all know how peevish
mere indigestion will make anybody. Or she, the well-intentioned and
outwardly well-circumstanced mother may, unknown to herself, have been
battling against the cruel handicap in some racial, heritable defect
in her husband; the child, therefore, may, with all her efforts, yet
fail to be joyous owing to the too strong physical bias which chance or
heritable disease has given it.
The existence of such apparently conflicting and contradictory
individual instances in no way refutes my main thesis, which is that
granted equal conditions of clean and wholesome ancestry, granted
equally favourable conditions of health and nutrition for the mother
during her period of carrying the child, that that child benefits and
is superior to the other who has had the advantage of a happy mother’s
conscious effort to transmit to it a wide and generally intellectual
and spiritual interest in the great and beautiful things of the world.
This fact is often illustrated in the different children of the same
parents. Of children born under as nearly identical circumstances
as may be possible within a year or two of time, the one may have a
totally different disposition with totally different qualities from the
other. The chance of birth, the inheritance of the innumerable possible
characteristics latent in both parents might be sufficient to account
for this were chance alone at work, but very often information may be
obtained from the observant mother which correlates her own state while
carrying the child with the after condition of the child itself.
One rather striking instance of such a correlation is by a curious
chance known to me, and should be of general interest. Oscar Wilde,
whose genius was sullied by terrible sex crimes, which he expiated
in prison, is known to all the world as a type whose distressing
perversion is a racial loss. His mother once confided to an old friend
that all the time she was carrying her son Oscar, she was intensely and
passionately desiring a daughter, visualizing a girl, and, so far as
was possible, using all the intensity of purpose which she possessed to
have a girl, and that she often in after years blamed herself bitterly,
because she felt that possibly his perverted proclivities were due to
some influence she might have had upon him while his tiny body was
being moulded.
Evidence upon this subject of the power or otherwise of the mother
to influence her coming child is wanted, and it is very difficult to
obtain, partly because of the reticence of those who have been through
the dim and secret mysteries of motherhood, and partly because their
accuracy cannot well be tested until after the child has reached
maturity. In these after years the mother is likely to be swayed by the
course the child’s life has taken, into unconsciously laying stress
upon one or other point which may seem correlated with its after
achievements.
Evidence, however, in the form of notes kept during the time the
mother is carrying the child which may be compared with the child’s
life in later years are very valuable, and, if any readers have such
with which they would entrust me, a sufficient body of such evidence
might possibly be accumulated to assist materially in the formation of
a strong spiritual asset in the creation of the best possible human
beings.
The father who desires to influence his child must do so through the
mother: had clever men more generally realized this we should have
heard less of the lament that clever men so often have stupid sons.
Of the more physical aspects of the mother’s power to influence
the form of the development of her growing child we have abundant
evidence. If the mother is starved, and by starved I mean less the
actual starvation from want of food than the subtler starvation of
improper food or food lacking in the truly vital elements, then the
child visibly suffers. For instance, rickets, a disease of grave racial
significance to which reference has already been made (see Chapter II),
is due to the lack of certain necessary elements in the food.
A simple diet, the simpler the better, is sufficient adequately to
provide all the essentials of nourishment for the mother and her coming
child, and much indeed may be done for the general health and beauty of
the child by providing the mother with the best form of material from
which the embryo may build itself. The use of foods containing large
quantities of vitamine (real butter and oranges, for instance, are
specially good) is very advisable. They are not only enriching in their
action in assisting true assimilation of other foods, but they probably
tend to make good the general drain on the mother’s vitality which
would naturally take place were she not amply provided with these most
subtle ingredients, which, though present in such minute quantities in
fresh food, are yet of incalculable value. The effect of proper and
specially adapted dieting, not only on the health of the mother, but
also on the beauty and general vigour of the child, is a thing which
is particularly expressed by various writers who have followed up the
early experiments on diet made by Dr. Trall.[5]
[5] This book has been reprinted in a modern expurgated and mutilated
edition, which deprives the reader of the most valuable portions of the
author’s work. I should advise readers to see one of the original early
editions if they desire to read the book intended by the author for the
public.
There is also Dr. Alice Stockham’s book, _Tokology_, to which I have
previously drawn attention. Although, as I then said, it contains
errors of a comparatively trivial nature such as calling carbonaceous
material “carbonates,” which may have been sufficient to prejudice
the scientific mind against the rest of her work, it contains the
profound and valuable message Mr. Rowbotham published in England in
1841, amplified, and to some extent enriched by this woman doctor’s
experience.
Those lovers who ardently desire their child and have a mental picture
of it long before its birth may delight in speaking of it to each other
as though it were, as indeed it is, alive. For this a name is required,
but in order to avoid the danger suggested on page 141, it is wiser
perhaps to choose the name of both a girl and a boy, the name which the
child would be called by according to its sex after birth, and, while
it is still unseen, to link the two together in speaking of the coming
child.
Sometimes for private reasons a girl in particular or a boy in
particular may be desired, but the well-balanced mind of a parent,
particularly of the first child, should welcome either a son or a
daughter, each of whom has its peculiar charms, and neither of whom
can be described as more valuable than the other. Our false estimate
of boys as superior is largely due to economic conditions and the
custom of male entail. This should, and of course will, be altered. It
is the first _child_, whether boy or girl is no matter, who is “the
first-born” with all that that connotes in rapture and wonder to its
parents.
Owing to the fact that more boys are born than girls, there is always
the greater chance of the birth of a boy than a girl. From this point
of view it would appear that girls are more precious, but boys are
oftener ailing and feeble and difficult to rear, so that it is perhaps
well that more of them should be born than of their stronger sisters.
Throughout its coming, the little one should be thought of in such a
way that it will be equally welcome whichever its sex, and thus be
given the best chance of developing fully and naturally in its own way.