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Womb RaiderDo future health problems begin during gestation?

By Darshak SanghaviUpdated Friday, Oct. 10, 2008, at 7:06 AM ET

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Emily Bazelon asked if nursing really affects your kid's IQ and if children actually need to sit in car seats. Bazelon also dismissed the link between birth order and IQ in 2007 and in 2006. Darshak Sanghavi looked at America's infant-mortality problem. William Saletan wrote that compassionate conservatism has entered the womb and noted that smart kids' brains develop slower. In 2004, Sara Dickerman asked whether pregnant women have always been scared that the foods they eat will harm their babies.

These myths arise from a broader frustration—and lack of rigor—in social-science research. Observe how Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner try to explain school failure in their otherwise sensible best-seller Freakonomics. Using data from the federal Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, they separate factors that do predict test scores (highly educated parents, high socioeconomic status, a maternal age over 30 years at time of first birth) and others that don't matter (moving to a better neighborhood, attending Head Start, watching less television, and having parents read to children daily). The authors conclude that securing a child's school success "isn't so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it's who you are."

But instead of admitting they can't capture the nuances of good child-rearing, they turn to biology. To explain how socioeconomic disparities affect test scores—apparently, Dubner and Levitt think parents can do little that matters—they trot out the old canard of IQ, the "strongly hereditary" trait they think drives educational and parenting success. Because their logistical regression models identify no practical strategies to help kids, they suggest that the problems must be in the genes. (The Bell Curve, Charles Murray's monumental tome of foolishness from 1994, made the same point: A kid is only as promising as his inherited IQ prophesizes. From the American Enterprise Institute, these days Murray claims 80 percent of Americans are biologically incapable of understanding college-level material.)

That impulse is understandable. It's easier—for parents, doctors, educators—to say an obese toddler has a slow metabolism than to teach the family better eating and exercise habits. Since 1970, childhood obesity rates have quadrupled. If fetal programming mattered a lot, adult obesity increases would lag years behind. But they don't. According to intelligence researcher James Flynn, the average IQ of the first wave of professional Asian-American immigrants was almost 10 points lower than that of white professionals; within one generation, the gap closed, suggesting that genes don't shackle the mind. As Malcolm Gladwell points out: "There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication to higher education."

Turning to the womb to explain complex social and public-health problems ultimately means people have given up on changing the things that really matter. That's too bad. The truth is that nothing in this world worth having comes easy. And as any hard-working student who made it to college, overweight person who's changed his or her lifestyle, or adult who's worked through depression can tell you, at some point you have to stop blaming your issues on your mother's uterus.

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Darshak Sanghavi is a pediatric cardiologist and assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is the author of A Map of the Child: A Pediatrician's Tour of the Body.

Photograph of a crying baby by Dick Luria/Getty Creative Images.

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