A Visitor Within: the Science of Pregnancy - Hardcover

Bainbridge trained as a vet which gives him a much wider view of pregnancy than medics get. His research into pregnancy in deer and the interactions between human babies and their mothers are not as disparate topics as you might think. To understand the whole story properly Bainbridge ranges far and wide across reproduction in other mammals apart from ourselves and even further back in evolutionary terms. After all, as back-boned animals, we have an amazingly long history--over 500 million years' worth--and sex is much older in origin, at least 1.7 billion years old to be exact. Pregnancy and birth, are for most of us miraculous and still rather mysterious. Like death, they are great levellers in society, something that we all experience. As Bainbridge says, "Pegnancy is a very democratic scientific challenge and it can inspire anyone." He certainly knows what he is writing about. As a breech birth baby, he was perhaps predestined to be interested in why human birth can be so difficult. For we are an evolutionary compromise, paying for our extraordinary brains with big heads that come at a painful and sometimes life endangering cost as any mother knows only too well.--Douglas Palmer

This tiny, greasy, pink baby that has just landed in our laps and looks as if it is trying to scream itself inside out - what sort of journey has brought it here? How can we make one of these amazing little people, seemingly out of nothing? These are questions that people have asked throughout history: not just the great thinkers among us, but ordinary people like you and me. The miracle of pregnancy - for that is what it is - is one of the few mysteries that almost all of us have pondered. Pregnancy is a very democratic scientific challenge and it can inspire anyone.

This is why I decided to write this book. Ever since I first started to study pregnancy, I have been surprised by the interest that non-scientists have shown in my work. So, I have written this book for people with little or no scientific training who would simply like to know how pregnancy actually works. In my experience, a few major questions crop up in most people's minds when they wonder how we make our children. Why do women, and not men, bear children? How does a woman 'know' she is pregnant? How is a baby constructed? Why doesn't the mother reject the 'foreign' baby? How do mother and baby survive birth? In this book, I tackle each of these questions - in the last thirty years, science has provided us with the answers to all of them.

Since I started to work on the biology of pregnancy, I have found that it has a unique 'feel' to it - it is where our deepest emotions and driest analytical inquiries collide. Working all day in the lab on some placental gene or other, and then coming home to see my wife's pregnant belly swelling ever larger made me realise that pregnancy can be one of the hardest things to be objective about. It is never just a science - it is an integral part of our lives that has been woven into our bodies, our history and our mythology. Most of all, pregnancy is a story, and this is why I have written this book as the chronology of a single pregnancy from conception to breastfeeding.

Within the last twenty years, we have finally learnt enough about pregnancy for almost all of its story to be told. Now, for the first time, a coherent story of pregnancy can be told in a form that anyone can understand. This is why I believe this book is important: it is a guide to the 'hows' and 'whys' of pregnancy, at a time when pregnancy is about to become a controversial and emotive issue. Modern technology will soon change pregnancy for ever, possibly even making it redundant. This change will affect all of us, and we need to know how pregnancy makes people if we are to make the right choices about whether let people change pregnancy.

Yet despite the impending furore about how we can change pregnancy, this is a book about pregnancy 'pure and simple'. Although a great deal has been written in the last few years about surrogacy, designer babies, human cloning and so on, I hope this book will convince you that natural pregnancy is far more interesting than any crude tinkerings that scientists have so far attempted. Nor does this book deal with the politics of childbirth, although many of the scientific findings that I discuss inform our attitudes and treatment of pregnant women and their babies. As far as drama is concerned, natural pregnancy has it all: sibling rivalry, a battle of the sexes, questions of gender identity. We will see that studying pregnancy can help to tell us why people behave the way they do, why so many of us want to have children and even help us to understand who we are. After all, each of us is a little miracle, the product of a million-to-one coincidental meeting of one sperm and one egg that burgeons into a living, breathing person.

Although everyday life may make us forget it, this chance encounter is at the root of each one of us.