Big Baby

By weight, Mrs. Anthony Caruso's seventh child, born in Newark last week, should have been nine months old. He weighed 18 Ib. at birth. Ordinarily newborn infants weigh 7 Ib. During the first two or three days they usually lose 5 or 6 oz., but regain it by the beginning of the second week. Then the ordinary infant adds poundage until he weighs 20 to 21 Ib. at his first birthday. Mrs. Caruso's 18-lb. son, if he gains weight in proportion to his pre-natal precocity, will weigh 36 Ib. July 1, 54 Ib. next New Year's.

The bigger babies are at birth, the more troubles mothers & doctors have delivering them into life. Just why many babies are born too big for comfort a nd safety has always puzzled Medicine. For a long time doctors thought that elderly primiparae (women who had their first pregnancy after 30) would have oversize offspring. But just a year ago Dr. James Knight Quigley, Rochester, N. Y. specialist in obstetrics & gynecology, presented good evidence that the old supposition is not true. Babies of such women averaged, in his series of births, 7 Ib. 8 1/2 oz., which is about normal.

In passing, Dr. Quigley's data showed that "while pregnancy and labor in a woman having her first child after 30 carries with it an added risk to the mother and her baby, this hazard has been very much overestimated." More important than a firstling mother's age is her general health, the normality of her construction.

Thirty years ago Dr. Diarmid Noel Paton of Edinburgh noted that the undernourished mothers of Scotch slums bore undersized children. He concluded, and the idea still prevails generally, that the thinner a woman keeps herself during her term, the slimmer her child will be.

That conception Professor Percy Walthall Toombs of the University of Tennessee sarcastically flayed in last month's American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. He did "not wish to be understood as saying that it makes no difference what a woman eats during her nine months of pregnancy. On the contrary her diet is of the utmost importance and its regulation one of the chief features of intelligent pre-natal care."

But, he contended, "I have studied faithfully the protocols of untold numbers of matron rats who laid down their lives for the benefit of human mothers. ... I went over every bit of evidence for and against the hypothesis that a baby's birth weight is in direct relation to his mother's gain or loss during the gestation period. And I finally concluded that there is nothing in it.

"My contention is ... that the size of the child at the time of delivery is determined by factors quite distinct from this consideration, and in most instances, entirely beyond our control. Without going into an elaborate discussion of the inheritance of parental traits, we may very well turn to the experience of animal breeders, for example, those who raise mules. The diet of the equine mother differs considerably in various parts of the country, but the custom of breeding jacks to mares rather than stallions to jennets is universal, the stallion's colt is always too large for the jennet to bring into the world alive.

"If a small woman marries a large man, whose female relations are broad hipped and wide shouldered, her babies may 'take after her folks' and be sufficiently diminutive to pass readily through the confines of her narrow pelvis. And again they may not."

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