The Maternal Imprint
The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects
-
- 24,99 €
-
- 24,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Leading gender and science scholar Sarah S. Richardson charts the untold history of the idea that a woman’s health and behavior during pregnancy can have long-term effects on her descendants’ health and welfare.
The idea that a woman may leave a biological trace on her gestating offspring has long been a commonplace folk intuition and a matter of scientific intrigue, but the form of that idea has changed dramatically over time. Beginning with the advent of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century, biomedical scientists dismissed any notion that a mother—except in cases of extreme deprivation or injury—could alter her offspring’s traits. Consensus asserted that a child’s fate was set by a combination of its genes and post-birth upbringing.
Over the last fifty years, however, this consensus was dismantled, and today, research on the intrauterine environment and its effects on the fetus is emerging as a robust program of study in medicine, public health, psychology, evolutionary biology, and genomics. Collectively, these sciences argue that a woman’s experiences, behaviors, and physiology can have life-altering effects on offspring development.
Tracing a genealogy of ideas about heredity and maternal-fetal effects, this book offers a critical analysis of conceptual and ethical issues—in particular, the staggering implications for maternal well-being and reproductive autonomy—provoked by the striking rise of epigenetics and fetal origins science in postgenomic biology today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harvard GenderSci Lab director Richardson (Postgenomics) scrutinizes in this rigorous academic study "the bewitching idea that the environment in which you are gestated leaves a permanent imprint on you and your future descendants." Though she believes that "bodies register their social and physical environments in ways both subtle and profound," Richardson characterizes data linking "diverse, confounded, and often unspecified stressors registered by the fetus while in the maternal milieu" to obesity, cardiovascular disease, and other health and developmental outcomes as "cryptic." She also warns that representations of this research in magazine articles and pregnancy guides tend to be "simplified and alarmist," and may pose a threat to pregnant women's autonomy. A detailed discussion of convoluted findings from the 1960s and '70s about the causes and effects of birth-weight disparities between racial groups supports Richardson's claim that today's "level of interest and excitement about maternal-fetal epigenetic programming far outstrips what the science actually can and does show." Though wading through the mountain of statistics Richardson gathers can be tedious, she issues a persuasive warning against research interpretations that foster "a punishingly expansive conception of individual maternal responsibility." Policymakers, health-care providers, and scientific researchers will want to take note.
