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Volume 6: Number 4: Article 3
A New Look at Maternal Impressions: An Analysis of 50 Published Cases and Reports of Two Recent Examples
Ian Stevenson, Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry,
University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, Virginia
22908
The idea that a pregnant woman may be so frightened by the sight of
some deformity on another person that her baby will be affected by a
similar defect is widely believed in most parts of the world today;
it was also generally believed in the West until the early years of
this century. The skepticism that then developed may have derived from
lack of an explanatory principle and not from lack of evidence for a
significant correspondence between stimulus and birthmark or birth defect.
The present paper summarizes the main features of 50 published cases
in which an unusual stimulus to a pregnant woman was followed by the
birth of a baby with unusual birthmarks or birth defects that nearly
always corresponded closely to the stimulus the pregnant mother had
received. Two recent cases that the author investigated are presented.
The author concludes that in rare instances maternal impressions may
indeed affect gestating babies and cause birth defects. Almost nothing
is known about why such effects occur in some pregnancies, but only
rarely, or about the implementing processes involved. These may be paranormal.
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