Liza

Conceived in stress

M. L. Tan

Filipinas sometimes startle foreigners when they say, "I’m conceiving." From a westerner’s perspective, conception is a moment, the point when sperm and ovum say hello.

Not so with Filipinos. Our term paglilihi refers to a "conceiving" process that stretches through the first few weeks of pregnancy. It is a crucial period that’s believed to determine the child’s health and, some say, even the child’s features. During this period, a mother’s every wish, every craving, has to be satisfied, or else the child’s health will be adversely affected.

Doctors often dismiss these beliefs as being unscientific but there is accumulating evidence to show that a mother’s health during pregnancy does have many effects on the child, including some that affect the child all throughout his or her life.

Some of the more immediate effects are obvious. Pregnant women who are malnourished, or who smoke, drink or use other drugs (nicotine and alcohol are drugs, too, in case you’ve forgotten), have greater chances of delivering babies with low birth weight. That’s defined as a weight of less than 2.5 kilos or 5.5 pounds. Low birth weight babies tend to be more sickly, and may die during infancy or childhood. The survivors continue to be rather sickly, and their cognitive development may be impaired.

Some studies now show that the mother’s health may affect children way beyond childhood. For example, because of the war and a severe winter, the Dutch had serious food shortages in 1944-45. Researchers found that the child born to women who were pregnant during this Dutch Hunger Winter actually had normal weights at birth, but when they reached adulthood, many of more them had diabetes.

Similar findings are now being reported in different parts of the world – from Finland to India – demonstrating correlation between a mother’s condition during pregnancy and the child’s predisposition, in adulthood, to diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases.

It’s not just a matter of maternal nutrition, or the woman’s use of drugs, that affects the child. The key is stress – whether from the mother’s own condition or her external environment -- which triggers the production, in the pregnant woman, of more stress hormones. These pass through the placenta and reach the fetus. Experiments in animals found that exposing fetuses to stress hormones resulted in high blood pressure and elevated blood glucose levels, and that these conditions worsened as the animals grew older.

Remember the stress hormones – adrenaline for example – are actually helpful hormones. When we face a stressful situation, our bodies prepare us to respond to the situation by pumping out adrenaline. Our hearts beat faster, we hyperventilate, and our blood pressure shoots up. All that enables us to respond appropriately, sometimes described as the "fight or flight" mode.

The adrenaline levels should drop back to normal after the crisis is over, otherwise, your body shuts down and you go into shock from the overload. A similar situation exists with the other stress hormones. Researchers believe that a fetus exposed to stress hormones may result in the brain being "hard-wired" or conditioned to keep operating on a permanent stress mode, producing the hormones even when you don’t need them. Thus your blood pressure or blood sugar stay elevated, and become chronic conditions.

There are other little explanations and theories to show how maternal stress affects the child’s future development but it’s interesting how they all support our popular notions of paglilihi. This notion of a prolonged period of "conception" is one way our culture allows our overworked women – to rest, and to get the food they need. They’re even entitled to special treats, like getting that fruit that isn’t in season, or being able to say no to their husband.

Our notions of paglilihi also support the wisdom of family planning. Our pregnant mothers go through so much stress with poverty, civil strife and war, but all that stress is further amplified if the woman is pregnant every year, or even every other year, with harmful effects on the mother and the child.

Even if the mother and child survive the pregnancy, it will an uphill battle with the sickly and malnourished child. The recent medical findings that I just described remind us that entire societies have to pay for the costs of all this stress, not just in terms of sickly children but of more adults having diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

I’ve wondered, at times, about the children born between 1983 and 1986, during the turbulent economic and political crisis following Aquino’s assassination. They are coming of age now, only to enter another serious crisis. I fear that ill health in Filipino mothers and children has become a vicious cycle, with one generation after another conceived, born and raised in stress.