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The Right Way to Get Pregnant

By William Grigg

There's a similar trade-off for women who must take insulin daily to control their diabetes. They are several times as likely to have a baby with a major defect. However, if a woman stops her insulin, neither she nor her unborn infant may survive. That's another reason to see a doctor before conceiving a baby – yet only about one woman in four does so.

Increasingly, we are seeing that our unborn babies can also be hurt by what we eat (or don't eat), what substances we handle at work, at home and in the farm or garden, as well as many other environmental factors. Some of these substances can subtly influence the IQ, health, development and motor skills of children still to be born – still, in some cases, to be conceived.

For example, lead may be passed along. It can accumulate in the bones of a young girl exposed to it and be released, years later, exposing her unborn child. The lead can lower the child's IQ. One study shows lead may even contribute to a child's chances of getting into trouble with the law.

A mother's exposure to mercury can delay her child's development. That may also be true of PCBs, still another NIEHS study suggests. There are undoubtedly other chemicals, metals and other exposures that also produce such effects.

Harm can also result from deficiencies – from substances a pregnant woman fails to get. If you have been eating a diet without sufficient folate or folic acid, a B vitamin found in green leafy vegetables, when you become pregnant there is a greater risk of deformities called neural tube defects of the brain and nervous systems. In these defects, the infant may fail to develop a brain or, more commonly, the spinal column may fail to close around and protect the spinal cord. Without this protection, the baby's spinal cord may be injured during the upheaval of birth so that the baby may be partially, but permanently, paralyzed.

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!