Monday 09 October, 2000
Internal Communications
Devleoping babies can hear, taste and feel pain. They can tell the difference between Mozart and Mahler - so could you stimulate your baby to give it a head start once it's born? Can you overdo or underdo the stimulation? And in time when foetal surgery is becoming evermore possible, what do we know about the experience of pain in the unborn?
Health Matters explores current theories of foetal development.
How Do Foetuses Communicate?
According to Fred Schwartz, an anaesthesiologist at Piedmont Hospital, Atlanta, mother and foetus almost certainly communicate through hormones. There is a passage of catecholmine, stress hormones, that goes back and forth between mother and foetus.
If the mother is having good feelings then the baby is probably feeling this too. If the mother is very stressed then the foetus probably has high levels of stress hormone too. The long term effects of this is that the blood flow to the foetus decreases, the oxygen consumption increases and the baby develops more slowly.
Do Unborn Babies Feel Stress?
A doctor in Regetti in Italy is reported to have shown mothers a set of slides. Some had stress provoking images such as a serpent, other slides had peaceful images such as a beach. He recorded the pregnant mother’s heart rate response to either the stressful or peaceful slide. He also recorded the foetal heart rate response.
When stressful slides were shown the mother’s heart rate went up and so did the heart rate of the foetus. When the peaceful slides were shown the mother’s heart rate came down and so did the foetus’s.
After the foetuses were born the doctor played a recording of the distressed mother’s heart rate to the new born babies. The new born babies responded with an increase in their heart rate and moved in an excited way. The study concluded that babies can recognise something in the mother’s heart rhythm during pregnancy and after birth.
| 'Mother and foetus almost certainly communicate through hormones' | |
Can Abuse Affect The Unborn?
In Leon, Nicaragua, one in three women said they had been abused during pregnancy. A study based on the women there found that mothers who had been abused during pregnancy by a spouse were four times more likely to have an underweight baby.
Women who had been abused during pregnancy or even before their pregnancy were enormously stressed. As a result most of the babies were small for their gestational age, leading the researchers to conclude that stress can have an adverse effect on foetal growth.
Are Unborn Babies Right or Left Handed?
Peter Hepper of the Welcome Trust Foetal Behaviour Research centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland, believes that the development of handedness starts remarkably early. He suspects that handedness is determined as early as eight weeks when the first independent arm movements begin.
When studies compared the number of left and right arm movements it was found that the majority of foetuses move their right arms more than their left. It works out roughly 90% which is similar to the instance in the adult population itself.
The current view of the development of handedness is that it is linked in some way to symetries in the brain. Research suggests that there is a difference between left and right hemisphere and this somehow feeds in to the use of left and right arms. The movements at eight to nine weeks involves no brain at all. These are at the level of the spine.
It would therefore appear that humans have a major motor pattern that is significant in adulthood which, pre-dates atmospheric differences in the brain.
| 'Assisted delivery runs the risk of the unborn being exposed to a very high level of stress' | |
What Level of Pain Does a Foetus Experience?
As yet it is not possible to measure the level of stress response in a foetus. But by taking blood samples it is possible to see that stress/pain related hormones such as Noradrenaline and Cortisol appear in the blood stream from 18-20 weeks gestation. It has therefore been suggested that foetuses can experience pain and stress from this time.
The main stress that babies are exposed to is birth. Research has shown that if babies are born by assisted delivery, for example using forceps or vacuum, they run the risk of being exposed to a very high level of stress; normal vaginal delivery is thought to cause intermediate stress levels and caesarian is thought to be the least stressful way to enter the world.
The Wider Picture
Scientists are discovering more and more about a baby's capabilities in the womb. It is now belived that they are able to experience stress and pain, with the possibility that the stress experienced whilst in the womb affecting their future health and well-being.
While having this knowledge is useful it also calls into question existing practices such as performing operations on foetuses and new born babies without anaesthetic. There is still a long way to go before we know all of the capabilities of the developing baby and the factors that influence it's development in the womb and beyond. However there is one question major factor yet to be addressed - when does a foetus become concious? |
 |
 |
|
| How Can Prison Affect The Unborn? |
 |
|
|
Most people would think that being sent to prison while pregnant would be extremely stressful. However research on women who had spent time in prison suggests that prison may be a safer environment for the developing foetus than originally thought.
It was found that women who spent time in prison during their pregnancy had babies that weighed the same as non-incarcerated women. Women who had been in prison before pregnancy or after pregnancy produced low birth weight babies.
The research concludes that the women studied were most likely to have arrived at prison from situations of poverty and substance abuse – both factors that contribute to poor birth weight. By removing women from these situations the negative influences on the baby's development were reduced. |
|
 |
|
|
