The Mother and Her Child | Page 8

This does not by any means imply that we do not have power and
ability to fashion our careers and carve out our own destiny, within the
possible bounds of our hereditary endowment and environmental
surroundings. Heredity does determine our "capital stock," but our own
efforts and acts determine the interest and increase which we may
derive from our natural endowment. From the moment conception
takes place--the very instant when the two sex cells meet and
blend--then and there "the gates of heredity are forever closed." From
that time on we are dealing with the problems of nutrition, development,
education, and environment; therefore, so-called prenatal influence can
have nothing whatever to do with heredity.
A father may have acquired great talent as a physician or a surgeon, in
fact he may hold the chair of surgery in a medical college, but each of
his children come into the world without the slightest knowledge of the
subject, and, as far as direct and immediate heredity is concerned, will
have to work just about as hard to master the subject as will the same
average class of children whose parents were not surgeons. This must
not be taken to mean that certain abilities and tendencies are not
inheritable--for they are; but they are inherited through the parents--and

not from them--directly. These transmitted characteristics are largely
"stock" traits, and usually have long been present in the "ancestral
strain."
MATERNAL IMPRESSIONS
A mother may sing and pray all through the nine months of expectancy,
or she may weep and scold, or even curse. In neither case can she
influence the spiritual or moral tendencies of her child and cause it,
through supposed prenatal influence, to be born with criminal
tendencies or to grow up a pious lad or become a devout minister.
These tendencies and characteristics are all largely determined by the
"depressors," "suppressors," and "determiners" which were present in
the two microscopic and mosaic germ cells which united to start the
embryo at the time of conception.
The child is destined to be born, endowed, and equipped with the
mental, nervous, and physical powers which his line has fallen heir to
all through the past ages. Down through the ages education, religion,
environment, and other special influences have no doubt played a small
part in influencing and determining hereditary characteristics; just as
environment in the ages past changed the foot of the evolving horse
from a flat, "cushiony" foot with many toes (much needed in the soft
bog of his earlier existence) into the "hoof foot" of later days, when
harder soil and necessity for greater fleetness, assisted by some sort of
"selection" and "survival," conspired to give us the foot of our modern
horse, and this story is all plainly and serially told in the fossil and
other remains found in our own hemisphere. It would appear that many,
many generations of education and environment are required to
influence markedly the established and settled train of heredity
regarding any particular element or characteristic in any particular line
or lines of hereditary tendencies.
EUGENIC SUPERSTITION
There is probably more misinformation in the minds of the people on
the subject of "maternal impressions" and "birthmarks" than any other
scientific or medical subject. The popular belief that, if a pregnant

woman should see an ugly sight or pass through some terrifying
experience, in some mysterious way her unborn child would be
"marked," deformed, or in some way show some blemish at birth, is a
time-honored and ancient belief.
Such unscientific and unwarranted teaching has been handed down
from mother to daughter through the ages, while the poor, misguided
souls of expectant women have suffered untold remorse, heaped blame
upon themselves, lived lives literally cursed with fear and
dread--veritable slaves to superstition and bondage--all because of the
simple fact that a certain percentage of all children born in this world
have sustained some sort of an injury or "embryological accident"
during the first days of fetal existence. For instance, take the common
birthmark of a patch of reddened skin on the face, brow, or neck. As
soon as the baby is born, the worried mother asks in anxious tones:
"Doctor, is it all right, is it perfect, has it got any birthmarks?" On being
told that the baby has a round, red patch on its left brow, the ever-ready
statement of the mother comes forth: "Yes, I knew I'd mark it, I was
picking berries one day about three months ago, and I ate and ate, until
I suddenly remembered I might mark my baby, and before I knew what
I was doing, I touched my brow and I just knew I had marked my
baby." Do you know, reader, that that birthmark was present fully four
months before she passed through that experience in the berry patch?