Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood

Rating:
Summary: The top of the food chain
Review: You don't have to be pregnant to read this book. Steingraber is a poet and a scientist, sometimes both at once. From the very first paragraph of the preface, her poet's eye pulls us into the "ecosystem of the mother's body," and we share her amazement that she had "become a habitat. [Her] womb was an inland ocean with a population of one." Before she finishes, she has also realized that contrary to received opinion, "man" is not the top of the food chain: the nursing baby is! There are many more pithy and poetic observations, but I won't give any more of them away as they are a large part of the book's power to enchant.

The science, especially the toxicology, is perhaps a little detailed for the expectant mother to assimilate in one reading, but one can always go back and take up one topic at a time, as Steingraber does in the course of the monthly chronology she follows. The early passages on the formation of the fetus are wonderful. The story of which cells start where and the landmarks of their migrations reads like a travel narrative. But then abruptly, S leaves behind the high art of embryology and her pregnancy "becomes empirical." Her toothbrush feels too big for her mouth, she is cranky, the bread of her sandwich is the wrong kind, and it's cut wrong. After some personal perspective on morning sickness, she once again adopts her scientist's perspective to investigate the causes of this nearly universal experience and why there is so little expert knowledge about it. We have soon learned more than we have ever heard about it before. In similar manner, alternately technical and lyrical, she covers both the science and personal experience of amniocentesis, congenital defects, fetal growth, prenatal education, birthing, and nursing-through to weaning. One can always find sources for the facts presented as well as avenues to find out more in the footnotes at the end of the book. At whatever speed one reads it, the book's message is very clear: the mother's body does a marvelous job of protecting the fetus from dangers that have existed on an evolutionary timescale, but there is now a new set of alarming environmental dangers that have intensified in the last several decades. Pregnant women must become aware of them and take steps to avoid the ones they can, and we all must work to change global policies that threaten us all.

My 30-something daughter, who gave me the book, was born during what Steingraber calls the "heyday of the [natural childbirth] movement"-after Grantley Dick-Read and then Marjorie Karmel had reintroduced women into their own birth experiences but before seemingly innocuous technologies sabotaged awake births once again. The books we loved then, Karen Pryor's Nursing Your Baby, Niles Newton's Family Book of Childcare, and Robert Bradley's Husband Coached Childbirth, to name a few, are not up-to-date enough and they do not address the new generation of dangers in pregnancy and birth. Steingraber is up-to-date, and she does address them. I repeat my recommendation to start Having Faith now and to read it often.