Living on planet Earth is bad for your unborn baby: official

Today the RCOG (Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists) has issued a report advising mothers-to-be to avoid all sorts of agents in the environment in order to give their offspring the best chance of success in later life. These include food packed in plastic, food in tins and even new cars. Now we all know that that "new car smell" is kinda funny, but isn't this a little bit crazy?

There is already overwhelming evidence that smoking and drinking in pregnancy has a toxic effect on the foetus, though critics have suggested that the evidence for the other things mentioned above is lacking, and they have a point. So: has the RCOG gone too far?

I don't think so. You see, the fact is that all sorts of strange things can happen in the intra-uterine environment which can have a devastating effect on the life of the unborn baby, and we don't understand all of them. Everyone knows about the terrible effect of certain drugs (thalidomide immediately springs to mind) and infections like rubella, but some babies are born with significant defects for no readily apparent reason.

The transformation of a single celled zygote into a seven pound baby is one of the most extraordinary miracles in nature. Babies in the womb grow faster than the most malignant tumour, yet while a cancer is just a blob of undifferentiated tissue, in babies every cell is completely differentiated into bone, sinew, nerve and so on, and all in exactly the right place. But sometimes, for reasons we do not yet understand, it goes horribly wrong

Let us take the case of anencephaly, a situation where the top half of the brain fails to form and affected children always die within hours of birth. No one knows why. And this awful condition is commoner in south Wales and the north-east of England than anywhere else in the world. Now these areas are both known for their economic deprivation, but then plenty of other areas are even worse, so that cannot be the sole answer. At one time the agent responsible was thought to be a virus that causes potatoes to rot, but further research discredited this theory. We're back where we started. So if the RCOG's off-the-wall ideas were adopted by the nation as a whole, and if even a few less foetal malformations resulted, wouldn't that be great?