http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2008/09/26/hfh.fortin.pregnancy.stress.cnn
Stress and pregnancy
Stress may play a role in a child’s future, as passed from mother to baby during pregnancy. Judy Fortin reports. • Health News – Medicine, Diet, Fitness and Parenting from CNN.com.
When I read the post and watched the video, I immediately emailed it to my OYGYN who is semi-retired. I’m sure he will have some cogent comments.
Joan Wheeler sent this link to GRC_Update@yahoogroups.com, a forum that regularly posts items of interest to the adoption reform community. Although adoption is not mentioned in the story, it’s not hard to connect the dots.
In Israel, medical researchers followed women who were pregnant during the Six Days War and the children born to them and found a higher incidence of psychological disorders in the children. Researchers have long debated the cause of an observed phenomenon that adoptees seek psychological treatment more often than the general population and some maintain that they are disproportionately represented in prisons and/or mental institutions. If future research bears out the findings of this study, it would seem that we can advance a hypothesis about why.
Women who were pressured to surrender a child to adoption — and we all know someone who had that experience — passed the attendant stress along to their unborn children. There’s no way to prevent that, only ways to try to reduce the mother’s stress. If the circumstances are such that no efforts are made to alleviate stress, but rather to ratchet it up to achieve the desired result, the mother signing away parental rights, what sort of future problems are adoption professionals creating when they engage in “persuading” unwed mothers to give up their children?
I’d really like to see the media take a look at that.
Adoption Beat 
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