Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the Future

by Marie Carmichael Stopes

We can, again, as suggested by Féré, very well believe that the maternal emotions act upon the womb and produce various kinds and degrees of pressure on the child within, so that the apparently active movements of the fœtus may be really consecutive on unconscious maternal excitations. We may also believe that, as suggested by John Thomson, there are slight incoördinations in utero, a kind of developmental neurosis, produced by some slight lack of harmony of whatever origin and leading to the production of malformations. We know, finally, that, as Féré and others have repeatedly demonstrated during recent years by experiments on chickens, etc., very subtle agents, even odors, may profoundly affect embryonic development and produce deformity. But how the mother’s psychic disposition can, apart from heredity, affect specifically the physical conformation or even the psychic disposition of the child within her womb must remain for the present an insoluble mystery, even if we feel disposed to conclude that in some cases such action seems to be indicated.

Direct evidence of the physical aspect of my thesis is found in the fact quoted by Marshall in The Physiology of Reproduction, 1910, p. 566:—

So also it has been found that immunity from disease may be acquired by young animals being suckled by a female which had previously become immune, the antibody to the disease being absorbed in the ingested milk.

Further argument upon these lines might well be brought forward in favour of the view that the potential mother, during the months whilst she is acting as the child’s total environment in all physical ways, is also through her mental states and conditions affecting the child’s ultimate mentality and artistic and spiritual powers.

This subtle control exerted over the formation of the child may be visualized as more like some effect parallel to the remote influences of the internal secretions in controlling the other organs of the body than the more mechanical picture of things visualized by the Mendelians and those who concentrate on the purely physical and material aspects of heredity as related to chromosome structure.

The tendency in recent years in biological work has been far too much to lay stress upon the curiously mathematical laws Mendel discovered, and consequently to concentrate attention upon the physical chromosomes as containing the factors which carry hereditary qualities. Physiologists are now making an attempt to bring back into the treatment of life a more rational outlook, and nothing has contributed more to the scientific basis of this than the recent following up of the suggestions made so long ago as 1869 by Brown-Séquard. Since Starling named the internal secretions Hormones (see the Croonian Lecture, 1905) they have been much discussed by physiologists and some medical men (see for instance the recent work of Blair Bell, The Sex Complex, 1916 already quoted).

To form a rough mental picture of what is happening one must combine the physiological and the mechanical outlooks. One then obtains the idea that the mother is, through her mental states, affecting and to some extent controlling the production of the various internal secretions, and other more subtle and still undetected influences from various organs upon other organs, and that, in so doing she is making the environment for the various hereditary factors, in which their potentialities find it possible to develop or to be suppressed according to the circumstances which she thus creates. As is now beginning to be realized, we all have an immense number of latent potentialities, which may lie dormant and develop only under suitable circumstances.

Thus in my view the mother may actually and in every sense fundamentally influence and control the character of her child, working through the remote effects of internal secretions which play on the complex material factors of hereditary qualities which form the material basis of the child’s potentialities.

Thus both heredity and environment have a vital part to play in building character, but greater than either is the subtler environment within the prospective mother created by her during the nine antenatal months.