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ADHD.[15] “Poor people have more exposure to these things on all counts, whether the bad air, or psychosocial stress and other things,” Dr. Shanna Swan, reproductive endocrinologist and vice chair of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, pointed out. “That’s a societal problem and the changes are not going to be on an individual level. They’re going to be on a societal level.”[16] Thus does inequality of opportunity, even in the basic biological sense, begin in the womb.[17] Long before we had brain scans, blood tests, ultrasounds, and fetal heart monitors, ancient peoples intuitively understood the sanctity of the intrauterine environment. I spoke once about addiction to a First Nations group here in British Columbia, quoting studies on prenatal development such as cited above. A young man came up to me afterward. “You know,” he said, “in our clan, tradition was that if you were angry or upset, you weren’t even allowed to go near a pregnant woman. We didn’t want you to inflict your troubles on her baby.” In some African tribal societies, infants were greeted by rituals while still in the mother’s belly, including with songs that would later welcome them into the world.[18] Imagine hearing your own melody and lyrics, already familiar to you, as you are ceremonially ushered into your new home, the outside world. Such collective traditions have mostly been lost to colonialism and atomization, but we can still learn from them and apply their lessons. “We know prenatal depression and stress and anxiety can predict behavior problems in the child,” Professor Letourneau told me. “We can try to fix those behaviors in the kid years later, or we can medicate the child, or we can give pregnant women the support they need in the first place.” Support. If we want to build a world that provides it, we could start by asking its would-be recipients what the word means to them. I recently asked Rae—if I could do it over again, I would have done so long before now— what would have supported her back then. I can’t improve upon the wisdom, nor the accuracy, of her answer: “It would have helped if I had had a community in place. If there existed a larger consensus in our culture of what is required to gestate a baby. It would have helped if I had had a doctor or a social worker or family member who could have stood up for me. If the doctor had asked me, even once, how I was faring emotionally . . . If anyone had phoned my husband: ‘Are you aware you are hurting your baby? Whatever problems you have with your wife, your role now is to be protective of her and of the infant she is carrying.’ We all need to realize that entering a pregnancy should be like entering a shrine, a sacred place and time: a baby is being built. “Mental health needs to be on the curriculum as soon as a woman gets pregnant—just as there are prenatal classes for the physical birth, so there should be for the emotional birth. The woman’s focus must be on the baby, and not on the husband or even the job; the husband’s focus—everyone’s focus—must be on supporting the woman. Parents need to know that their job is mutual, that while the wife is pregnant, the husband is also pregnant. Society needs to protect pregnant women because everybody is creating this child. It takes a world to make a baby