SOMETIMES it pays to lie to your doctor, even if it makes you nervous at the
time.
I did鈥攁nd years after the big lie, I鈥檝e still got no regrets.
Especially since I found the justification in the British Medical Journal (27
January) the other week.
Big babies are smart, the paper said. Large birthweight correlates with
bright brains. A survey of 3900 people revealed that size, rather than any other
factor such as social background, matters. By monitoring intelligence from the
age of eight, you can show a firm link between the big, bouncing infant and a
sharp brain in the child and young adult.
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This set off a lovely trail of other correlations, all possibly false.
Could obstetricians be responsible for the wails of horror about how badly
school students are performing? American children make a poor showing compared
with children from other countries, particularly when it comes to maths and
science. And credulity seems to be on the increase among American adults: it is
commonly believed, for example, that a UFO crashed in New Mexico, that the US
military has concealed alien science, and that the Sun goes round the Earth.
Obstetricians are caught in the same trap as all medical staff. In a hospital
or a clinic you need order, routine and skill. The biggest struggle is imposing
order on the chaos that the natural world creates in the form of disease. But
when it comes to the healthy patient, someone in need of a check-up, advice,
regular treatment, whatever, the longing for order rules. Appointments booked
well in advance are the order of the day.
Pregnant women are not sick but healthy patients, but they are also the
embodiment of chaos. They can鈥檛 form an orderly queue because the onset of
labour is rarely predictable.
Doctors, it seems, have ways of imposing order on unruly nature. For the past
30 years, they have been promoting Caesareans and inducing labour after a set
number of weeks of pregnancy. Nowhere is this so marked as in the US, although
many other countries have followed. So all those Caesars and hormone pessaries,
and those tidy diaries, are stabilising birth dates at 40 weeks. This means that
a lot of babies are arriving before their natural time, and these 鈥渆arly鈥� babies
are smaller babies. So blame the obstetricians for the next outbreak of anguish
about falling intelligence.
And my great lie? I asked a friend who鈥檚 a doctor to show me how
obstetricians calculate the due dates for births. Babies in my family seemed to
arrive late. Wanting to avoid a fuss if I went more than a fortnight over my due
date, I fiddled it. (The friend made me swear to own up if the slightest thing
went wrong during pregnancy.)
Nine months, three weeks and four days later, I had a 9 lb 6 oz baby (4.26
kilograms to you). Bright? Yes, five university interviews to go, one place
offered so far.
Regrets? I had a few. Big may be brighter, but small is less painful.