A New Look at Maternal Impressions : An Analysis of 50

The idea that a pregnant woman may be so frightened by the sight of some deformity on another person that her baby will be affected by a similar defect is widely believed in most parts of the world today; it was also generally believed in the West until the early years of this century. The skepticism that then developed may have derived from lack of an explanatory principle and not from lack of evidence for a significant correspondence between stimulus and birthmark or birth defect. The present paper summarizes the main features of 50 published cases in which an unusual stimulus to a pregnant woman was followed by the birth of a baby with unusual birthmarks or birth defects that nearly always corresponded closely to the stimulus the pregnant mother had received. Two recent cases that the author investigated are presented. The author concludes that in rare instances maternal impressions may indeed affect gestating babies and cause birth defects. Almost nothing is known about why such effects occur in some pregnancies, but only rarely, or about the implementing processes involved. These may be paranormal. Introduction and Review of Earlier Reports The belief that a shock or other strong impression in a pregnant woman can produce a mark or other defect in her baby has been held for centuries; although it is less common now in Western countries, it is still widely accepted in other parts of the world. In a typical reported case of this type a pregnant woman sees on the street a person with a serious deformity, such as feet that have been partly amputated. She becomes distressed and fears afterward that her baby will be similarly malformed. When the baby is born, parts of its feet are absent, the defects corresponding to the defective feet its mother saw (Montgomery, 1857). Cases of this type are usually called "maternal impressions." In most instances the stimulus is a visual one perceived by the pregnant woman, but sometimes a vivid verbal description of a defect the mother has not herself seen may act as an apparently causal factor. Writers on reproduction and embryology in ancient Greece and Rome assumed the reality of maternal impressions, and so did their successors, at least up to the 16th century, when Par6 (157311982) cited cases of the type and endorsed the idea that maternal impressions could cause birth defeck2