That was really interesting. Although I have to say that on these boards, people tend to get very angry and defensive whenever research is posted about things like infections during pregnancy being linked to autism, etc etc, and I don't think we should reject research when we feel it "blames the mother." Research results are just indicating what researchers found, not assigning blame and if we want to learn more about diseases, etc, then we need to do research. We shouldn't shut it down because the results make us uncomfortable. I think this article makes a great point about looking at the research and not taking that step towards blame.
It's not the research that blames the mother (data don't discriminate)--it's the way it's framed and reported in the mainstream media. For example, research could indicate a correlation between maternal anxiety and some health problem in the fetus. Ok, fine. But when the report comes out in USA Today as "Anxious Moms Putting Unborn Children at Risk" is when it becomes a problem. How about we find ways to support these moms rather than blame them for a problem that's not their fault?
We did research in college with stress and pregnant mice. The interesting part from one was when the male mice were injected with alcohol (drunk mice) and then mated with a mom. There was no gestational stressors. The mice fathered by mice with alcohol grew differently and received different care from the female mice.
Post by sillygoosegirl on Aug 26, 2014 23:49:32 GMT -5
I went to a great talk a year or so ago by Raj Patel, which wasn't about this, but touched on it. It was about food, mostly about our industrialized food system. But the guy also talked about a program to improve infant nutrition in Malawi by getting more women to breastfeed and to breastfeed longer. There was all this work on educating women on the benefits and getting them support for breastfeeding and all that. And it basically failed. But then they started over with a new approach: teaching and encouraging men to take over some traditional "women's work" so that their wives would actually HAVE TIME to breastfeed their babies. The second approach actually worked.
Just because it's the woman who does or doesn't do it (gestate the baby, breastfeed, etc), doesn't mean she's operating in a vacuum. She isn't.