Apart from bringing up memories of dancing to the Blink-182 song when we were 12 at the school disco, this title is meant to convince you to embark on a little journey back to the few months when you were nothing but a promise of a human being in your mother’s womb (or in other words, a foetus).
We all know now that smoking and drinking alcohol is really bad for pregnant women, and we can assume that at least our generation was born in much better conditions than any others before us. And it shows: we are taller, better fed and even more, we are living longer in a healthier state than our predecessors. But we are yet to understand the full extent of how conditions in our mothers’ wombs have changed us, and in a crude sense, maybe even pre-programmed us to get where we are now.
According to a few studies by experts in Health Economics, there may be reasons to believe something as seemingly insignificant or small as our weight when we were born, as an indicator of womb conditions, might predict our future socio-economic status!
If the classic sci-fi image of babies developing in artificial wombs, designed to have different roles in life does not adhere to your ethical principles, you are probably a very well-adjusted human being and you will be happy to know this is not the case I am talking about. Obviously, we all live in different environments and that affects and changes us in very different ways. But what the studies show is that the conditions in which we develop even as a foetus can have a latent impact, not just on our health, but also on our human capital parameters, such as knowledge or status.
(Image: vice.co.uk)
I will not go into the technicalities of how this happens, but researchers have found that children born under the weight of 2500 grams were less likely to be employed at age 33. On the other hand, another study found that an increase in birthweight by 10% seemed to increase height by 0.3%, earnings by 0.9% and even high school graduation by 1.2%!
However, don’t put the blame of having to re-sit that horrible exam last summer solely on your mum not having eaten enough vegetables 20 years ago! What these studies emphasize though is that ‘All the Small Things’ that happen to us even before birth have a lot more importance and should be treated even more seriously than they are. After all, we’d all love our future offspring to be little Einsteins, wouldn’t we?
(Image: truthiscool.com)
Sources:
Currie & Hyson. ‘Is the impact of shocks cushioned by socioeconomic status? The case of low birth weight’. 1999.
Black, Devereux, and Salvanes. ‘From the cradle to the labor market? The effect of birth weight on adult outcomes’. 2007.
Almond & Currie. ‘Killing Me Softly: The Foetal Origins Hypothesis’. 2011.
Fries. ‘Aging, natural death and the compression of morbidity’. 1980.