From CNN:

When does learning begin? As I explain in the talk I gave at TED, learning starts much earlier than many of us would have imagined: in the womb.

I was surprised as anyone when I first encountered this notion. I’m a science writer, and my job is to trawl the murky depths of the academic journals, looking for something shiny and new — a sparkling idea that catches my eye in the gloom.

[…]What it all adds up to is this: much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life — the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she’s exposed to, even the emotions she feels — are shared in some fashion with her fetus. They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. The fetus treats these maternal contributions as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside.

By attending to such messages, the fetus learns the answers to questions critical to its survival: Will it be born into a world of abundance, or scarcity? Will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? Will it live a long, fruitful life, or a short, harried one?

The pregnant woman’s diet and stress level, in particular, provide important clues to prevailing conditions, a finger lifted to the wind. The resulting tuning and tweaking of the fetus’s brain and other organs are part of what give humans their enormous flexibility, their ability to thrive in environments as varied as the snow-swept tundra in Siberia and the golden-grassed savanna in Africa.

The recognition that learning actually begins before birth leads us to a striking new conception of the fetus, the pregnant woman and the relationship between them.

The fetus, we now know, is not an inert blob, but an active and dynamic creature, responding and adapting as it readies itself for life in the particular world it will soon enter. The pregnant woman is neither a passive incubator nor a source of always-imminent harm to her fetus, but a powerful and often positive influence on her child even before it’s born. And pregnancy is not a nine-month wait for the big event of birth, but a crucial period unto itself — “a staging period for well-being and disease in later life,” as one scientist puts it.

This crucial period has become a promising new target for prevention, raising hopes of conquering public health scourges like obesity and heart disease by intervening before birth. By “teaching” fetuses the appropriate lessons while they’re still in utero, we could potentially end vicious cycles of poverty, infirmity and illness and initiate virtuous cycles of health, strength and stability.

For those who would like to hear an excellent, formal academic debate on abortion, I will steer you towards this debate between the ACLU’s Nadine Strossen and Life Training Institute’s Scott Klusendorf. You’ve probably never heard anything like this debate – it features real arguments on both sides that will help you to decide whether abortion is moral or not. Over 50 million unborn children have been aborted in the United States since abortion was legalized. Is it time for us to be more careful about with sex? Maybe it’s not just another form of recreation.

For those of you who would like something to read, I recommend “The Case for Life” by Scott Klusendorf for beginners. Advanced students will benefit more from”Defending Life” by Francis J. Beckwith, published by Cambridge University Press.