Science & Discoveries
What Babies Are Teaching Doctors by Elizabeth Carman
Babies Are Cosmic cites research and clinical observations from pioneers in birth psychology, developmental psychology, and medicine who are paving the way for cultural, medical, and social acceptance of the idea that babies are conscious beings from conception to birth and even before.
An inspiring promise of the new millennium is that we are poised to embrace a paradigm where we understand that babies are conscious and aware at multiple levels of being prior to conception, during prenatal life, and at birth.
Here is an overview of pioneers covered in Babies Are Cosmic who are helping transcend the materialistic myths of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Thomas R. Verny, MD (Canada)
Dr. Verny’s bestselling book, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child (1981) drew public attention to the importance of prenatal experiences and how “birth and prenatal experiences form the foundations of human personality.” As a pioneering physician and psychiatrist, his review of the prenatal and perinatal science worldwide concluded that the unborn baby has far more abilities than scientists suspected, including womb learning and memory. The baby’s central nervous system is sufficiently developed by the age of 6 months in utero to be capable of laying down rudimentary memories.
Dr. Verny is co-founder along with David Chamberlain, PhD, of the Association for Prenatal & Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), an association dedicated to educating professionals and the public about how the unborn baby’s environment plays a vital role in its physical, mental, emotional and psychological development.
They established APPPAH so that practitioners, researchers, professionals and the public who believe that babies are aware and conscious in utero could have a place to exchange views. APPPAH has developed an educational program that seeks to improve human health from the very start, including epigenetics, neuroscience, psychological theories, bonding, how the womb is a learning environment, the importance of the baby’s experiences of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding.
The message of APPPAH is:
Babies have experiences in utero, and these experiences have implications throughout life. Each of us comes into life with a blueprint for health and wholeness, and then we may encounter experiences that create ‘imprints’. These range in type and degree, and can be positive or negative, depending on the experience. These include chemical imprints from pollution, emotional imprints from our mother’s experience, physical imprints from our position in utero or in relationship with a twin or our mother’s body, birth imprints from how we are born, and more. They can also be good experiences, such as feeling seen, heard, safe, protected, loved, connected, supported and a sense of belonging; this is the human blueprint.
We can support parents, birthing practices, society and culture to nurture wholeness as a blueprint for healthy, peaceful, connected human beings from the very beginning, before conception. If difficulty happens, we have reparative practices and education to further support families and individuals.
David B. Chamberlain, PhD (USA)
According to Dr. David Chamberlain, the last scientific barrier to full recognition of infants as persons may fall with the acceptance of the possibility of complex personal memory at birth.
In 1986, he published Babies Remember Birth, outlining experimental research supporting the existence of prenatal memories and a small collection of birth memories from children who startled parents with birth memories when they began to talk.
In 2013, he published Windows to the Womb, Revealing the Conscious Baby from Conception to Birth. This book teaches that the unborn child has twelve senses, displays all forms of intelligence that are currently being analyzed in adults, and they are learning constantly from their experiences in utero, regardless of the amount of brain matter they have at the time. This emerging view of dynamic, responsive life in utero contrasts with the failed view of fetal passivity and unconsciousness, calling for a redefinition of who babies are and what they can know and do. Dr Chamberlain wrote, Babies are powerful beings with a huge mission. On arrival, they turn women into mothers, men into fathers, and couples into families. They humanize us, teach us tenderness, and inspire attachment. If we let them, they lead us toward a true civilization. And for all this, they get no particular credit for a magnificent effort!
A baby’s sentience, sense of self, and many abilities are not dependent on brain development. They precede it. As Dr. Chamberlain said,
Prenatal psychology is assisting in the creation of a new paradigm about babies, moving from talk of “reflexes” to talk of sentience; from “brain” talk to talk of mind; from “conditioned learning” to talk of logic, thinking, and telepathy. Unavoidably, we are working at the interface of flesh and spirit.
Varenka Marc, PhD, and Olivier Marc, PhD (France)
In the 1950s, the Marcs began to collect the drawings of children in Europe, Russia, Japan, Afghanistan, India, Iran, Egypt, Africa, USA, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, and also among the nomads in the Sahara. They found that these drawings reflected their earliest memories suggestive of the stages of fetal development from ovulation to birth.
Their book L’enfant qui se Fait Naitre (1981) shows 110 toddler drawings
Carolyn Rovee-Collier, PhD (USA)
Dr. Rovee-Collier pioneered the first early infant learning study titled “Conjugate Reinforcement of Infant Exploratory Behavior” (1969). She demonstrated that infants learn quickly, remember over long periods of time, and can retrieve and use their memories in a wide range of different circumstances.
Her studies catalyzed a paradigm shift, as Dr. Chamberlain noted, “The death of Freud’s 1916 theory of ‘infantile amnesia’ was aptly pronounced by Dr. Rovee-Collier when she referred to it as a ‘misconception—an effort to explain a phenomenon that does not exist.’”
Paul Hickey, MD, and Kanwaljeet Anand, MD (USA)
A 1992 study by medical professors Paul Hickey and Kanwaljeet Anand published in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that newborns experience pain when surgery is performed without anesthesia. The study, conducted from 1987 to 1990 on newborns undergoing heart operations, demonstrated that withholding complete pain relief is dangerous because the pain makes operations riskier. The 30 babies who received deep anesthesia recovered much better and survived whereas 4 of the 15 babies who received light anesthesia died after surgery.
They concluded: “Current knowledge suggests that humane considerations should apply as forcefully to the care of neonates and young, nonverbal infants as they do to children and adults in similar painful and stressful situations.”
Marshall H. Klaus, MD and Dr. John H. Kennell (USA)
There has been significant interest in the medical literature over the past 3 decades regarding how mothers bond to their newborns. Bonding is the emotional tie that is manifested by parental feelings of warmth, love, sense of possession, devotion, protectiveness, and concern. The parent takes pleasure in interaction, accepts impositions and obligations, and feels a sense of loss when the child is absent.
Pediatricians Dr. Klaus and Dr. John Kennell were the primary proponents of this hypothesis that there is a critical period shortly after birth that is important for mother-to-infant attachment and that skin-to-skin contact is necessary for secure bonding.
Akira Ikegawa, MD, PhD (Japan)
Dr. Akira Ikegawa, director of the Ikegawa OB-GYN clinic in Yokohama, has delivered thousands of babies over the past 38 years. He began the investigation of prenatal memory in 1999 and was the first obstetrician to conduct surveys on children’s prenatal memories.
Dr. Ikegawa published the first research in Japan that babies remember birth, womb time, conception, and before (2005). He conducted prebirth memory surveys with more than 3,500 children interviewed.
The average age of children in Dr. Ikegawa’s survey is 2, 3, and 4. Similar age range findings come from our survey as well as Drs. Stevenson, Ikegawa, Masayuki Ohkado, Thomas Verny, David Chamberlain, William Emerson, and Wayne Dyer.
Dr. Ikegawa’s survey reveals a drop in retention rate from 40% in 3-year-olds to 20% in 5-year-olds. By the time children reach adulthood, only 1% retain prebirth memories.
Dr. Ikegawa appears in “The Promise: Prenatal Memories of Children,” a documentary film by Norio Ogikubo. Watch a two minute trailer:
Masayuki Ohkado, PhD (Japan)
Dr. Masayuki Ohkado is a professor at Chubu University (Faculty of General Education) and at the Division of Perceptual Studies, University of Virginia. He is interested in children’s past life memories, NDEs, survival of consciousness after death, and how knowledge of these affects our way of life.
In 2015, Dr. Ohkado published the results of his Internet-based survey of 10,000 randomly selected Japanese women between 20 and 50 to find out if their children had womb, birth, pre-life, and/or past-life memories. The test looked for memories either shared spontaneously or when the child was asked.
Dr. Ohkado found that children divulge memories to their mothers. Mothers considered 87% of the birth memories as real, 83% of the womb memories, and 69% preconception memories. On the other hand, children sense that their fathers would not take them seriously. He proposes that popularizing knowledge about children’s memories would positively influence father-child relationships.
He published his findings, “Children’s Birth, Womb, Pre-life, and Past-Life Memories: Results of an Internet-Based Survey” in the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health.
Rebeccah Slater, PhD (UK)
In 2015, an infant-pain study at Oxford University confirmed that newborns are up to 4 times more sensitive to pain than adults. Fourteen researchers, led by Dr. Rebeccah Slater, tested 10 babies between 1 and 6 days old.
Dr. Slater said, “Some people have argued that babies’ brains are not developed enough for them to really ‘feel’ pain, any reaction being just a reflex—our study provides the first really strong evidence that this is not the case.”
Ian Stevenson, MD (USA)
As founder and director of the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, child psychiatrist Dr. Stevenson became known for his research into reincarnation. He traveled extensively over a period of forty years, investigating 3,000 cases of children who claimed to remember past lives.
Dr. Stevenson was the author of fourteen books on reincarnation. His major work was the 2,268-page, two-volume Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (1997). This reported two hundred cases of birthmarks and birth defects that seemed to correspond in some way to a wound on the deceased person whose life the child recalled.
Jim B. Tucker, MD (USA)
Dr. Tucker is a child psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia. He is Director of the University’s Division of Perceptual Studies, where he continues the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson with children who report past-life memories. Dr. Tucker worked with Dr. Stevenson for several years before taking over the research upon Dr. Stevenson’s retirement in 2002.
Dr. Tucker, who was raised Southern Baptist, had never seriously considered the possibility of past lives before reading one of Dr. Stevenson’s book. He became intrigued both by the children’s past-life memories and by the prospect of studying them using an objective, scientific approach. He has now published two books and numerous papers in scientific journals. He has spoken before both scientific and general audiences and has made a number of television appearances, including Good Morning America, Larry King Live, and CBS Sunday Morning.
What Babies Are Teaching Doctors
“You think I’m dumb, but I’m smarter than you think!”
Doctors Talking to Babies is Revolutionary
Babies Are Cosmic showcases medical doctors and psychologists who communicate with babies during pregnancy, labor, or after birth. Their mindful practices invite us to see beyond the accepted medical dogma and myths.
Here is information about the work of pioneers who understand that babies, from conception to birth, deserve the respect, gentleness, and understanding we bestow on an esteemed guest who has arrived after a long and arduous journey.
Françoise Dolto, MD, France (1908–1988)
Dr. Françoise Dolto, a pediatrician and child psychiatrist, made a number of original contributions to the understanding of neonatology, psychosis, female sexuality, education, and religion.
A mother of three children and author of 30 books, Dr. Dolto experienced that even newborn babies are conscious beings who are responsive to communication and are ready to understand and collaborate.
At the age of 8 after being misunderstood and mistreated by adults, Françoise promised herself to become a “doctor of child-rearing” [a pediatrician]. She wanted to help parents educate and understand their children. She said it was important that parents tell their babies the truth in order to affirm what the babies already know.
Her assertion that babies are rational is based in part on her own memory of how she had seen the world as a child, “And I used to wonder, having once been small and having grown up, how people could be so strange since they had been children. And I said to myself, ‘When I’m big, I’ll try to remember what it’s like to be small.’”
Frederick Leboyer, MD (France)
Dr. Leboyer’s book, Birth Without Violence (1975) demonstrated that newborns are very aware of the circumstances of their birth and readily respond to a reassuring, peaceful, and humane environment.
Gladys McGarey, MD, (USA)
Dr. Gladys McGarey is the founder of the American Holistic Medical Association, obstetrician, and has been a family physician for over sixty-five years. Beginning in the 1970s, she pioneered the concept of prebirth communication. Dr. Gladys, as she is affectionately known, inspired mothers to have a respectful attitude toward babies and to talk to babies in the womb and become receptive to impressions and communications coming from their babies. Dr. McGarey believes that maternal communications can offer an alternative to medical abortions in some cases of an untimely pregnancy. She considers abortion from the viewpoint of the child’s soul, which she maintains is aware and telepathic and has some power of choice. She wrote, “In all the struggles between the pro-choice and pro-life factions, no one seemed interested in what the child thought.” She contends that family planning may be a mutual process, with the child-to-be playing an important part in the arrangements."
William R. Emerson, PhD, (USA)
Dr. Emerson is among the first to develop to design and implement techniques to diagnose and treat birth trauma in babies and children. He discovered that prenatal and birth traumas are stored in the body, and therefore can be diagnosed and treated by somatic methods.
Babies and children can’t access traumas by talking about them, but they can by experiencing the traumatic pressures in their bodies. Traumas can be gently re-stimulated and babies and children feel very safe during treatment. He found universal body patterns to diagnose specific prenatal and birth traumas.
He gives an example.
A baby was born by forceps and had visible signs of head trauma, accompanied by neurologic soft signs: irritability, sensory overload, and extensive crying. During a treatment session in which I gently placed my hands near the forceps indentations, but not touching, I realized the forceps must have caused a lot of pain.
The next time the baby was in my presence, I just looked at him and said with great compassion, “Wow, those forceps must have really hurt!!” He shrieked as if hit by a lightning bolt, muted himself, looked me in the eyes with amazement and gratitude, and resumed shrieking, maintaining eye contact with me all the while.
On his fourth and final shriek, I sensed an intense and positive change in his cranial shaping. The baby stopped crying and appeared to be in deep peace. The cranial sacral therapist who had been assisting me gasped and said, “Oh my god, his cranium has normalized.” The forceps indentations were gone and so was the forceps shock. I realized that emotional catharsis can and does release shock from the body.
From that point on, I discovered all kinds of body and cranial shapes and postures that indicate unresolved shock, and allowed me to diagnose and treat shock by gently titrating and intensifying shock (trauma) postures for moments at a time.
Myriam Szejer, MD, (France)
Dr. Szejer is a practicing child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and Paris-based president of La Cause des Bebes (The Interests of the Baby). She goes to the bedside of 2- or 3-days- old babies suffering with weight loss, agitation, and prolonged crying and speaks to them as if they were adults. She clarifies their feelings and disperses their resistance to living. Ideally she speaks to them in the presence of the parents, which helps them and the newborn find their place in the altered world created by the birth.
Karlton Terry, MSW, (USA)
Karlton Terry, psychologist and Cofounder of the Institute for Pre and Perinatal Education, trains practitioners and parents to recognize baby body language and understand what babies are asking for. He teaches how to permanently resolve the typical baby challenges including persistent crying, sleep issues, and bonding issues. The cure for colic lies in understanding the cause of colic, and being present for babies with the compassion of accurate empathy.
Doll Reflection Therapy is an example of his work used in cases where one twin dies in utero. The chances are that the living twin experienced prenatal shock effects due to the loss from being close together.
Evidence of a lost twin loss comes during the pregnancy and after the surviving twin’s birth and includes the following:
- images of twins seen on ultrasound and then not seen on subsequent ultrasounds;
- pregnant mothers who experience bleeding, especially in the first trimester, and unknowingly lose a baby, while its twin survives; and
- the pregnant mother dreams about twins during the pregnancy.
- After birth, the surviving twin shows awareness of the twin loss by:
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a. repeatedly staring off into a particular direction, as if looking for someone;
b. crying in a profound and inexplicably mournful manner; and
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c. expressing loving reactions to a doll as a surrogate twin, suggesting an earlier relationship. (Other babies do not react to dolls in the same manner.)
Watch this 9 minute video at http://ippe.info/movies/twin-loss-doll-reflection-therapy.html where Karlton Terry releases the emotional stress in a surviving twin using “Doll Reflection Therapy.”
Marcy Axness, PhD, (USA)
Dr. Axness is the author of Parenting for Peace: Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers. Between teaching worldwide on prenatal/child and parent development and adoption issues, Dr. Marcy also has a private practice coaching parents-in-progress. Her clients love her compassion, sense of humor, down-to-earth approach, and helpful tools.
Wendy Anne McCarty, PhD, RN (USA)
Dr. McCarty is the cofounder of the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute (1999) where she taught courses in prenatal- and perinatal-oriented (PPN) therapeutic work. PPN’s primary tenet is that the unborn baby is capable of sensing, experiencing, and remembering as a conscious being, and thus stressful events may leave imprints on the baby in utero and during birth. Such events can have profound and lasting psychological effects. Dr. McCarty provides child-centered family therapy for children imprinted by early traumas. Dr. McCarty wrote:
I began seeing young toddlers and children in my practice in 1989 utilizing the prenatal and perinatal psychology framework and what I was learning with William Emerson, PhD. I set my office up with 300 to 400 sand-tray objects, everything that could be a symbol of eggs, sperm, tubes, embryos, fetuses, wombs, cords, placenta, in/out games, hospital scenes, babies, family life, and everyday symbols. I had props to make tunnels and caves, large and small. I developed a mindset that everything they showed me had meaning, and my role was to hold their stories sacred and to be with the mystery of it as it unfolded, until I understood what their stories were about.
Almost every previous belief I had was challenged by what these young children were showing me. When I began to write later about this work, I titled the publications “What Babies Are Teaching Us,” for they were the ones teaching me.
Mary Jackson, RN, LM, RCST (USA)
Clients call Mary Jackson the “angel of birth.” She has been a home birth midwife since 1975. She has attended over 2,500 births and is now attending the home births of her second generation of babies. She has been featured in 11 books and 5 movies. With over 40 years of home birth experience, Mary has developed a tremendous trust for what women's bodies are designed to do.
Mary is also a certified Castellino Process Workshop Leader and co-teaches the Castellino Pre and Perinatal Training. In the first year after incorporating these pre and perinatal approaches in her midwifery practice her home-to-hospital transfer rate went from 20% to 6%. Mary is participating in cutting edge research about imprints that occur around the time of conception, pregnancy, and birth and how they affect us the rest of our lives and what it takes to heal from challenges in these experiences.
She is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences and leads trainings throughout the world.
Watch a video where Mary shares an example of healing work with babies and children in “The Consciousness of Infants.” (start at .52).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S5EqsVJnMw
Nitika Sobti, MD, New Delhi, India
Dr. Nitika Sobti is a medical doctor working as a gynecologist and obstetrician. She is trained in Advanced Laparoscopic surgery apart from managing high-risk obstetrics. She is an APPPAH-Certified Birth Psychology Educator who helps expecting parents explore the earliest development of their child. Her special interest lies in teaching expectant parents to create the most positive and safe pregnancy and childbirth, made possible by her project named “Virtue Baby.”
Virtue Baby was first conceived in 2013. Through Dr. Sobti’s experiments in spirituality and its scientific application during pregnancy, she discovered that the mother’s thoughts and emotions have immense power in influencing the personality of the child. She applied her findings on her patients and after successful evidence decided to launch the Virtue Baby project to benefit all wannabe mothers, pregnant women, couples and parents across the world during conception, pregnancy, and childbirth.
Thus, Virtue Baby stands for holistic care of a mother’s thoughts and feelings that create hormones which are responsible for baby’s overall physical and emotional development and a long-lasting effect on the child’s personality. The Virtue Baby program includes:
Virtue Storybook—Reading stories to introduce moral values into your child within the womb
Virtue Scrapbook—all for baby, a chit chat book for parents to express their feelings and capture the moments to celebrate the most memorable nine months of their life
Womb Conversation Book—Forming a divine connection with your baby before birth: how you can do it yourself, when does it develop, and how it works
Relaxation Videos—For expecting mothers to stay calm and pass positive vibes to their child within the womb
Meditation Commentaries—To connect with the divine and imbibe virtues within yourself and your baby
Yoga and Physiotherapy—To encourage relaxation ensuring easy pregnancy and labor
Gerhard Schroth, MD, (Germany)
The cases of 7,000 pregnant mothers using a prenatal healing method called Bindungsanalyse (BA) have been researched and evaluated since 1995. BA is also called Prenatal Bonding and was created by Hungarian psychoanalysts Jenő Raffai and Gyorgy Hidas. Dr. Gerhard Schroth, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with 40 years experience, is carrying on their work.
Studies show the following results when pregnant women used Prenatal Bonding techniques:
- Experienced less anxiety and pain during labor
- Less effort giving birth and fewer complications
- Decreased need for obstetrical interventions and C-sections
- Low degree of birth trauma
- Excessive infant crying is unknown
- Babies slept longer and deeper at night with few awakenings
- Postpartum depression was less than 1%
- Babies were easy to communicate with, showed curiosity, and emotional stability
Doctors Talking to Babies is Revolutionary
“Your mother thinks you don’t understand me,
but I know that isn’t true.”
Is a baby in the womb a conscious and real person?
By Elizabeth Carman
Babies have a lot to teach us. They remember at a very deep level of consciousness their primal journey, the way they entered this world. But besides their memories of their birth and beyond, there are other signs of their keen awareness. Knowledge of the fetal sensory system, observations of fetal behavior in the womb, and experimental proof of learning reveal their awareness in the womb and as newborns. Consider the following.
- Unborn babies sense the difference between being loved and unloved.
- University and hospital studies reveal that unborn babies are interactive with their world, watching, listening, and learning.
- Unborn babies are able to observe events inside. Ultrasound observations as early as 16 -20 weeks of gestation reveal their fearful reactions during amniocentesis. Mothers and doctors have witnessed babies in the womb aggressively attack the amnio needle.
- Unborn babies are able to observe events outside the womb.
- Medical imaging reveals that twins in the womb display consistent behaviors towards each other, before and after birth.
- Research indicates that as early as 10 to 15 weeks, most unborn babies react quickly by moving within seconds when their mothers cough or laugh.
- Dr. David Chamberlain reported the case of a pregnant mother who accidentally received an electric shock while ironing clothes. Her baby sat bolt upright and immobile in the womb for two days—long after the mother recovered from the shock.
- Pregnant mothers viewed brief portions of a violent movie. Their babies became just as upset as their mothers.
- Renowned anthropologist Dr. Ashley Montagu reported that his mother's cousin birthed a daughter in London with a “Zeppelin” mark on her left cheek (early 1916). [Zeppelin: a type of rigid airship named after the German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.]
On the night of his niece’s birth, there was a zeppelin raid on London. The alleged association greatly puzzled Dr. Montagu. He wondered, “How could a zeppelin raid produce a zeppelin mark on a baby, especially one that was ready to be born?”
- Newborns are more sensitive to pain than adults.
- Newborns placed skin-to-skin with their mothers were quiet, but if they were placed in a separate crib, they began to cry. When placed back with their mothers, they quieted down.
Signs of Babies’ Secret Intelligence in the Womb
In his book, Windows to the Womb: Revealing the Conscious Baby from Conception to Birth, birth psychologist Dr. David Chamberlain identified 12 sensing abilities of prenates and newborns based on 35 years of science and psychological research in prenatal and perinatal psychology.
Ordinary senses are
- touch,
- thermal sensing,
- pain sensing,
- hearing,
- balance,
- smell,
- taste,
- mouthing to explore objects,
- and sucking and licking for pleasure.
Nontraditional extrasensory faculties are
- precocious early vision (clairvoyance),
- psychic sensing (telepathy), and
- transcendent sensing (a sense documented in beyond-the-body and near-death experiences).
Mom,
I had a little window that
I could peek out of
when I was in your belly.
My view is that the baby is always thinking.
But medicine doesn't have that view.
They are stuck behind the idea that
the brain is not yet fully functioning, not developed.
Not refined enough for thinking.
Not refined enough for learning.
Not refined enough to care what is happening.
All that is totally wrong.
The baby has a psyche (mind, soul).
—DR. DAVID CHAMBERLAIN
- Babies are thinking in the womb. Medical treatises and spiritual texts from India (Garbha Upanishad, Markandeya Purana, Srimad Bhagavatam) portray the incoming soul as a thinker. In the 7th month of pregnancy, the soul observes the movie of hundreds of past lives. He thinks, “I have seen thousands of wombs, eaten several kinds of food and sucked many breasts. Born and dead again and again, I am immersed in grief but see no remedy. Thinking of my good and bad deeds, I am suffering alone, although the bodies that enjoyed the fruits are gone. When I get out of this womb, I resolve to make this my last lifetime.”
This ultrasound picture reflects the sculpture “the Thinker.”
- Babies are conscious and listening. Water is a good conductor of sound and baby can hear very well in womb. There is a distortion, but babies can learn language from their mothers and to recognize the voice of mother and father.
Babies can be shocked by big, unexpected sounds. An ultrasound video from Italy shows a baby peacefully resting in the womb while music is playing in the background. Suddenly, the parents’ enter into a heated discussion. The father screams. He shatters a glass against the wall in a fit of rage. The baby freaks out displaying a whole body jerk. Those are things that baby can hear in womb.
VIDEO (hearing in the womb)
Babies are conscious of events inside the womb. During an amnio, the baby reacts with alarm including an increase in heart rate, a loss of beat-to-beat variations in heartbeat, and remaining motionless for a few minutes as if shocked by what has happened. Fetal breathing movements take several days to return to their previous calm.
Doctors do not know why the loss of such a small amount of liquid affects the baby’s emotional state. After all, amniotic fluids form quickly. Perhaps the baby is picking up the main reason for the amnio—question the parents are wanting to know “Do we want you? Are you good enough?”
Ultrasound imaging is helping overturn a century of speculations in obstetrics and psychology. The first exchanges of touch between twins in the womb begins when they were only a few inches long according to a 1996 European study which observed 25 sets of twins via ultrasound. The babies learned nearly a complete repertoire of mutual touching in less than a month and ended with complex interactions of embracement and kissing.
In 2017, a photo from an ultrasound video went viral showing identical twin baby girls sharing a kiss. The expectant mother Carissa Gill who went in for a 25-week ultrasound said, “It first started off Baby B was kissing Baby A on the cheek and then they started getting closer and then they actually kissed on the mouth. You can see their mouths open and close.”
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Unborn babies sense the difference between being loved and unloved. Dr. Thomas Verny reported the clinical experience of a Swedish obstetrician.
- The doctor told me, “It is my habit to take newborn to its mother after a few hours so that she can start bonding. One day, I took a baby to her mother, but the baby refused to suckle. The next day again, the baby refused to have anything to do with the mother.On the 3rd day, I put the baby on the chest of another mother who had also delivered. The baby immediately started suckling her breast.
I asked the first mother, “Are you taking antiobiotics? Maybe that is why your baby doesn’t want to touch you or breast feed.”
She said, “No.”
I asked “Did you want to have this baby?”
“Frankly no, I did not want to have this baby.”
The doctor assumed that the baby sensed his mother did not want him even before he was born.
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This example illustrates that bonding and attachment start right from conception, not after the baby is born. Parents must start relating to the baby from the beginning.
Life provides a certain amount of grace for us to make up for things. Once we realize we’ve made a mistake, we can make it up to our babies. We can talk to them, be more forthcoming, more direct in acknowledging mistakes and ask for the babies’ understanding and forgiveness. And then, of course, it’s never too late to love a baby. Relating to babies is a lot like relating to each other. We would do better if we make that assumption that they are like us and communicate to them directly.
—DR. DAVID CHAMBERLAIN
Babies Are Cosmic offers new perspectives on the way we look at unborn children, pregnant women, newborns, unseen helpers, and even ourselves.
See the following chapters in Babies Are Cosmic:
Chapter 10. Signs of Prenatal Intelligence
- Personality and Behavioral Traits
- Listening and Learning
- Pain Sensing
- Sensitivity to Diet and Chemical Exposure
Consciousness Matters Most—Size Matters Not
Chapter 11. The Psyche of the Unborn Child
Psychic Adults—Psychic Prenates
- Unborn Babies See Inside the Womb
- Unborn Babies See Outside the Womb
- Telepathy
- Love Sensing in the Womb
Love is the Most Crucial Curriculum
Chapter 14. Signs of Secret Intelligence of Newborns
Participating in Birth
Meeting Mom at Birth
Listening, Analyzing, and Responding at Birth
Smiling Newborns
The Newborn’s “Breast Crawl”
Chapter 15. Love Sensing at Birth
The Sacred Hour
Rescuing Hugs
More Pain Sensitive than Adults
Remembering Pain
Empathy is Key to Healing
Greater Love Ability
Human consciousness both precedes and supersedes
physical development of body and brain.
The primal period is not a grace period before life starts,
but is, in fact, formative in shaping the way people feel, think,
and approach life. In primal experience, the foundations
are laid for health, love and fear.
—DR. DAVID CHAMBERLAIN
The secret intelligence of babies highlights the need for a new standard of care. In essence, we need to be much kinder to babies because, as we will explore, every baby is no less a human being than any adult. They come into this world sentient and already deserving of love and tender care.
When babies are birthed into this world consciously, safely, and naturally, with love and compassion, they will express more secret intelligence right from birth rather than expressing negative imprints of a stressful prenatal or birth experience.
Research presented in Babies Are Cosmic may very well reinvent the parent-child relationship and foster a more compassionate world.
The lesson for parents is that unborn children remember the experience of gestation, implicitly, in the deepest part of themselves—the cells that give rise to their bodies and brains. They absorb joy and sadness, calm and anxiety, through a multitude of channels—cellular, sensory and cognitive—in an array of centers from single cells to the limbic lobe to the cerebral cortex itself. Though these memories rarely rise spontaneously to adult consciousness, they become the substrate for feelings and behaviors throughout life.
—DR. THOMAS VERNY
Is a baby in the womb a conscious and real person?
Babies want us to know:
They are spiritual beings, not blank slates.
They want to be born in peace.
Type 1: Children’s Preconception Memory
PRECONCEPTION MEMORY includes details of life before biological conception. Common elements include:
- Children recall an existence in a spiritual realm, such as heaven, “the sky,” “above the clouds.”
- Children describe choosing their parents and peering down at earth through a portal or window in heaven or through the clouds.
- And they describe encounters with otherworldly beings, like angels, celestial beings, dear ones on the Other Side, and other children waiting for birth, such as siblings.Here are examples of these memories.
- 1-year-old Samantha held her mother’s face in her hands, looked deep into her eyes, and said, “I picked you to be my mommy.”
- Hazel: I was sitting on the sofa with my 4-year-old son Neo when he said, “Mama, I was with Luna (his 1-year-old sister) before we were born and I was in your tummy. We were together and surrounded in green light. Sometimes we used to see angel Michael."
- In Children Who Communicate Before They Are Born, Dietrich Bauer, Max Hoffmeister, and Hartmut Görg relate the case of an unwed mother who gave up her child for adoption. The Child Welfare Office placed the child in a series of foster homes. They eventually found him a permanent home with a childless couple. The morning after the child’s very first night with his adoptive parents, he told his new mother while being dressed, “Mummy, I always wanted to come to you, but the little door was shut.”
- Sara: My husband and I could not have children, but we really wanted to have one. My husband is Chinese Canadian and we ended up adopting a girl from China. When Carol was 4 or 5, she always asked us to tell her funny or interesting stories about our lives when we were young. Carol loved these stories and we told them over and over again.
One time, she said, “Mom, I planned that! I wanted you two to be friends when I was in heaven!” Apparently she saw my husband and me as teenagers while she was in heaven and told God, “I want those people to be my parents.” She pestered God so much that he relented. - In a 2015 British online article on children’s past-life memories, a mother shared her daughter’s “choosing” memory.
Our youngest daughter, aged 3, sat on the floor playing with her toys and suddenly said, “Do you remember before? When I was up in the sky and I chose you?”
“No, I don’t think I do. Can you tell me some more so that I can remember?”
“I saw you from up there (pointing towards the sky through the window), and I waved. Did you see me waving?”
“I don’t think so. Could you tell me any more to help me remember?”
“They said I could choose a mummy and daddy. I looked; then I chose you and I waved at you.”
“Did I wave back?”
She said, “No.”
So I told her, “I don’t think I saw you.” - Japanese obstetrician Dr. Akira Ikegawa’s interview with Tomoya Sato and his mother is featured in a documentary on children’s memories. At the age of 3, Tomoya claimed that he chose his mother before he was born. Later on, he drew a picture of Kamisama, a Buddha-like being, holding a ball of light and seated cross-legged near a temple. Golden spheres of light circled around him.Tomoya said, “People are like balls of light before coming into human shape. Kamisama asks each one, ‘Which mother do you choose?’ Kamisama made me into a ball of blue light and sent me to my mother’s room.”
The idea that children retain memory of events before conception and during gestation and birth may sound farfetched. The challenge is that most of us have been brought up in social, educational, and religious systems that teach nothing about life before birth. Psychologist Gwen Dewar, PhD, refers to the belief that babies can’t remember as outlandish. In a 2012 article “‘Babies Can’t Remember’ Is Bunk” published in Psychology Today, she emphasizes:
When adults discount the abilities of babies to remember, they might find themselves treating babies more like objects and less like people. And that can’t be good for babies. The claim that babies don’t remember is unscientific—and potentially harmful.
3 types of communication
between pregnant mother and unborn child
Incoming babies are responsive to communication, sensitive to emotional nuances, and vulnerable to physical trauma.