Dangers Before Birth

Can illness or emotional stress in a pregnant woman damage the child? For the most part, doctors have tended to answer no, but now they are far less certain.

Item: countless pregnant women are subjected to outside emotional stresses, such as loss of husband by death or desertion, serious illness or death of a child, loss of income, housing problems. Item: many also suffer mysterious internal stresses apparently brought on by pregnancy, e.g., continued uterine bleeding or toxemia, an ill-defined, little-understood condition believed to be caused by unidentified poisons, often accompanied by high blood pressure, liver or kidney disease. Item: countless babies are born sickly, or with obvious deformities, or with impaired mental powers. Doctors are asking themselves what connection there is between these facts.

Medicine has largely debunked the cruder old wives' tales, e.g., that a strawberry birthmark follows a strawberry-eating jag by the mother-to-be. But it is no old wives' tale that German measles in the first three months of pregnancy can be crippling or fatal to the fetus (TIME, Dec. 31). Now more such evidence is piling up. In London's Lancet, Psychologist Denis H. Stott of Bristol University reports a study of 102 mentally retarded children, makes a strong case that prenatal influences (as opposed to injury during birth or later illness) are to blame.

Stott found that 55% of the retarded children had been ailing from birth, usually failing to gain weight, or losing weight, during the first few weeks. This was double the rate among their brothers and sisters (not retarded), three times the rate among unrelated comparison groups.

Of the 102 retarded children, no fewer than 67 resulted from troubled pregnancies. In 24 cases, the mothers had clearly been ill--half of them suffering from toxemia. In 38 cases there had been marked emotional stress brought on by husband trouble, illness or death in the family, threat of eviction, or, in the case of two unwed women, being abandoned by the men they had expected to marry. There were nine cases of shock or accident. With some overlaps, such factors were found in 66% of the retarded children's backgrounds, but in only 30% of the normal children's. Among the retarded children, 15% had physical deformities (fused fingers, clubfoot), ten times the rate among comparison groups.

Like harelip and cleft palate (TIME, Sept. 17), mental retardation may show up oftener in certain families without being directly hereditary by any Mendelian pattern. Dr. Stott's theory: the tendency may be hereditary, and disease or distress during pregnancy may touch it off.

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