The Myth of Normal 116
intolerable pressures contemporary society places on the rearing milieu, the family, and on the developing young—and, as epigenetics teaches us, on the very activation of DNA itself. We need to consider to what extent our culture, including employment and the health care and insurance systems, supports or undermines women’s capacity to hold their unborn infants’ needs as a high social priority. How many women are asked during prenatal checkups about their mental and emotional states, what stresses at home or on the job they may be experiencing? How many future physicians are even taught to pose such questions? How many spouses are helped to understand their responsibility to protect their expectant partners from undue stress and travail? How many businesses make provisions for their pregnant employees’ relief? That last question has an especially dismal answer: women frequently report a pregnancy-hostile work milieu, especially in lower-paid jobs. But even in supportive workplaces, women are often burdened by the pressure they have absorbed and put on themselves to perform, advance, even excel in a competence-mad society. Work rarely “stays at work.” As Rae intuited, the baby feels the mother’s stress directly. “By listening intently to movements and heartbeats, researchers are finding that the fetuses of mothers who are stressed or depressed respond differently from those of emotionally healthy women,” the New York Times reported as far back as
