The Right Way to Get Pregnant

By William Grigg

Most women's miscarriages, like most birth defects, have no clear cause, but genetic defects have been seen in some lost fetuses. Surely the environment also plays a role, just as it does in the birth of preemies – early, underweight infants. (The newborns of smokers, for example, are more likely to be born prematurely than the newborns of non-smokers.)

A: What you eat, drink and do during pregnancy and just before pregnancy is vital to your child because, for nine months, your body is your child's environment. Your circulatory system feeds nutrients to your unborn child's system through an organ called the placenta. Your circulatory system also removes waste materials from your child via this organ, which is attached to the wall of your uterus and to the bellybutton of your baby.

We used to think that the placenta kept poisons from reaching the unborn child. That popular idea was dealt a death blow in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when many women took a sedative called thalidomide, which caused hundreds of children to be born with flipper-like limbs where their arms and legs should be.

Then in 1971, after it was prescribed for more than 20 years to try to prevent miscarriages, diethylstilbestrol, or DES, was found to have produced rare cancers and reproductive abnormalities in "DES daughters," the daughters born to the women being treated. (At NIEHS, we did some of the research that showed DES's adverse effects. Later, in test animals, NIEHS scientist Retha R. Newbold also found that harm may extend to "DES granddaughters" and to "DES grandsons.")

Want to see more?

• Safeguard Your Fertility: 6 Simple Steps
• Too Toxic to Conceive: Is Your Lifestyle to Blame?
• Private Suffering: The Issue of DES Daughters
• Talk about it!