Living Before Birth

It is very important for parents to treat an unborn child kindly

Years ago it was believed that a human child is born to life as a blank piece of paper, on which it is possible to write anything you want. Specialists believe nowadays that a human life starts at the moment when two reproductive cells become one. It is hard to believe, if it is really so. However, the practice of the unique Kharkov Pre-Birth Center shows that parents can affect physical and psychological health of their child before it is born. This center is attached to the Scientific center of the clinical genetics and perinatal diagnosis. The center is meant to develop the new practice – the pre-natal treatment.

Up-to-date technologies allow to take pictures of a child when it grows inside its mother. Modern ultrasound technologies give an opportunity to catch even family resemblance. Mothers usually have a positive reaction to the moving image of an unborn child, whereas fathers usually experience a shock.

“There is no word in our culture to indicate that a man and a woman become parents not after the birth of their child, but nine months before it happens. Unborn children feel everything that happens in a woman’s life, when she is pregnant. Men become fathers from the moment of conception. We help people to come to the realization of this fact. We show them how a child reacts to touching, how an unborn child yawns and smiles, how it moves its tiny fingers. The psychological situation changes to the better after that, such practice helps to retrieve corrupted emotional links in a young family,” director of the center, Julia Grechanina said. The first group of would-be parents came to the center two years ago. A lot of family couples have been to the center since that time, both healthy and not.

When a family couple comes to the center, specialists teach young people, how to talk to their unborn child. One should say things like “We love you so much, our dear baby, we are waiting for you.” Doctors say that such a “heart-to-heart talk” is very good for future relations between parents and children. No woman,  who has been to the classes of  the center, has ever had breast-feeding problems. The specialists of the center teach relaxation methods, child care, special exercises for pregnant women. Doctors tell parents, what an unborn child feels in its “paradise,” what it can see and hear at different levels of its growth.

“It is an open secret that pregnant women are presumably tense all the time, their feelings are intensified. We teach would-be parents to find positive sides in various situations. For example, a disease is always treated as trouble, although there is another attitude about it too. You can see your relatives and close people taking care of you, for instance. If something bad happens to you, it means that there is something good hidden behind it too. It would be good to think, what kind of a lesson your life tried to teach you,” psychologist Alexander Kolesnikov said.

One of the most interesting classes of the center is the selection of music for every mother and child. Unborn children already have their preferences. The majority of them like classical music or natural sounds like rain or sea sounds. Some children prefer jazz or even electronic beat. Specialists discovered long ago that children sleep very well to their favorite sounds, both before and after birth.

Those couples, who have various hereditary problems often come to the center as well, for they want to give birth to healthy children. Pre-birth treatment can weaken the action of the family pathology gene. A pregnant woman’s dysbolism can lead to the fact that a child will be mentally retarded when it is born. Sometimes it happens that doctors diagnose an infectious disease of an unborn child. It is a lot easier to cure such a disease before a child is born than vice versa. Specialists avoid any aggressive medical interference, the use of antibiotics, for example. Polyvitamins, microelements and special diets are used instead. Several couples have already become happy parents, although their original forecasts were rather sad. Independent experts confirmed that their babies were more active and sensitive than other children of the same age.

By the way, Canadian scientists discovered hormonal changes in the organism of those men, who just became fathers. As it turned out, the fathers of two or three month infants had a lot less of the testosterone male hormone in comparison with childless men. Scientists discovered that young dads had more of the female hormone estradiol, which takes part in the formation of motherly conduct. Scientists suppose that young fathers start imitating their wives, when they take care of their kids, playing the role of a tender woman.

Ancient cultures of a lot of nations had some knowledge about unborn children too. When a Chinese woman told her husband of her pregnancy, he would put his hand on her stomach and tell his unborn child what it would have. They believed in China that if a child agreed to live with its parents, it would be born successfully. If not, pregnancy would stop itself then.

Izvestia

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov