Vivette Glover on Life Before Birth – and life after it

Tell me about Deborah Blum’s book.

This centres round the work of Harry Harlow who worked with monkeys and needed to breed more of them. He isolated them very early and took them away from their mothers and kept them clean and well-fed. They were fat and appeared healthy but they were miserable and rocked backwards and forwards. He started to understand that what was missing was maternal affection. This was very out of the current climate of the time. For example, Blum describes an American pamphlet distributed widely between 1914 and 1925 called Raising a baby the Government Way. It included the advice “never kiss a baby” and “parents should not play with the baby”. The influential psychologist Watson stated “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument”. This is a good description of how attitudes have changed and I was stimulated by someone working in the same lab, Mary Schneider, who noticed that if you stress pregnant monkeys the babies are more anxious. This is a beautiful model of the effects of pre-natal stress.

The book describes how Harlow, in his studies of monkeys, helped to change attitudes to child care. He found how baby monkeys clung to a cloth model monkey rather than a wire one, and then went on the develop a scientific study of mothering and affection, and how important this is for the development of the child. The book also explains some of the more recent work that has arisen out of all this, and how we are now starting to understand how more sensitive mothering can affect the structure of the baby’s brain for life, and have long tem effects on behaviour.

Tell me about The Social Baby

This is by a colleague of mine, and I have been very influenced by her. It describes how mothers with post-natal depression can effect the outcome of the child. The babies are more anxious and more depressed themselves with some cognitive delay and ADHD.

That is very worrying.

Well, the more positive side is that a lot of children in society have these problems and the more we can understand them the more we might be able to help. Guilt is the last thing I want to induce and that isn’t where we should be going, but we now know how to prevent these things - by supporting pregnant women more and women who have just had a baby. As a society we can help them and thereby help the next generation. It also has implications for crime – ADHD and cognitive delay are strong indicators for criminal behaviour. If we want to prevent crime and prevent bad outcomes we need to start in pregnancy. This book is about the effects of post-natal depression but it is also a description of what happens when things go well.

Until quite recently it was thought that babies had no feelings, and were unaware of their surroundings. In the 1980s newborn babies were operated on without anaesthetic because it was thought they did not feel pain. Much research in the last 20 to 30 years has shown how very sensitive newborn babies are, how delicately they interact with their mother, and how long lasting these interactions can be. Older children, of mothers who had postnatal depression, are more likely to be anxious or depressed themselves and to have slower cognitive development.

This book shows, frame by frame, the marvellous two-way interaction that a sensitive mother can have with her baby. If the mother opens her mouth, so does her baby. If the baby smiles so does the mother. However it also shows how this interaction can go wrong. Depressed mothers are often over intrusive and poke their baby inappropriately for example. The book shows a mother putting her face too close to her baby, and how instead of initiating a happy interaction, the baby turns away and becomes sad and unresponsive.

A Child is Born.

This is the most outstanding book of photography showing the development of a child from the very beginning. It shows the initial blob of a few cells after the sperm meets the egg, and all the later developmental stages, culminating in the fetus at the end of pregnancy, just ready to be born as a new baby. It shows the development of all the organs, and of the hands and feet, and an unborn baby sucking its thumb at 20 weeks gestation.

Many of the photographs have become famous, and no one has ever taken better.

What implications does the knowledge about different stages of development have?

I have written about fetal pain and I think the fetus can feel pain at about 20 weeks. At 13 weeks the brain is not connected to the rest of the body. You can touch the foot and it might move away but that is just a reflex.

It has made me very aware of the different stages of development. As far as abortion goes, I would have little concern under 13 weeks and I am not always against late abortion. The trouble is that in later abortions they often chop the fetus up before extracting it. I don’t know for sure because we can’t ask them, but the state of the nervous system between 20 and 26 weeks would suggest that it is increasingly likely they would feel pain.