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In April 1998, 15 weeks pregnant with my first child, I went to Boston to undergo an amniocentesis, which involves removing a syringe full of amniotic fluid from the uterus with a long needle. The results of my amnio were destined to turn out fine. “Unremarkable” was the word the nurse would use to describe them. (A more lovely adjective was never spoken.) What was remarkable, however, was how much this procedure made me aware not just of my genetic past, but also of my present surroundings. It reminded me that women’s bodies are the first environment.

After she pulled the needle out, the obstetrician allowed me to hold the still-warm sample in my hands. The quarter-cup of liquid inside the glass was pale gold.

"It’s good that it’s nice and yellow," the obstetrician said, "because that’s a sign of normal kidney functioning."

Of course. I had forgotten that amniotic fluid consists, in a large part, of fetal urine. It also contains fetal saliva and nasal secretions.

This started me thinking about the water cycle: Where does amniotic fluid ultimately come from? Before it was urine, the golden fluid that surrounded my baby was the juice I had drunk for breakfast and the milk I had poured over my cereal. It came from rain water and ground water. Whatever existed in the potato fields and dairy farms, in chicken eggs and drinking water wells, existed also in the interior environment of my uterus, with its precious population of one. Whatever was in the world’s water was in womb’s water. A flurry of new research bears this out.

More than Bubble Wrap

Secreted by cells lining the amniotic sac, amniotic fluid serves as a kind of liquid bubble wrap, protecting the fetus from physical trauma. It also contains elements, such as immunoglobulins, that ward off infectious injury, and new research suggests that amniotic fluid may help shape the infant’s own developing immune system. During the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, amniotic fluid passes freely through fetal skin and into the body. This fluid is also inhaled and swallowed, exposing the fetal respiratory and gastrointestinal tract to the various immunological factors dissolved in it. According to one new study from the University of Texas in Galveston, this contact may prepare the mucosal lining for future work in immunity.

Another study from California shows us what else is dissolved in this magical fluid. Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles have found low levels of pesticides and industrial chemicals in the amniotic fluid of one-third of the 30 pregnant women they tested. These substances included the oily electrical fluids called PCBs and the byproducts of two banned pesticides, lindane and DDT. All are suspected endocrine disrupters; they are also associated with immune suppression. Once born, a baby’s main route of exposure to these dangerous substances is through food and breast milk. Stored in body fat, minute exposures build up over a lifetime and then are released back into the bloodstream during pregnancy. The only way to get these chemicals out of human amniotic fluid is to keep them out of women’s fat tissues, which means getting them out of the food chain. This means keeping them out of the environment in the first place.

The Cake that Feeds Us All

"Placenta" is Latin for flat cake, an apt name. At birth, the placenta is a round disk about eight inches across and one inch thick – about the size and shape of a single-layer cake. Because fetal and maternal blood do not commingle, it used to be thought that the placenta created a perfect bulwark against toxic exposure. Not so: the placenta simply sorts chemicals primarily on the basis of molecular weight, electrical charge, and fat solubility. Small, neutrally charged molecules that readily dissolve in fat – like solvents – are afforded free passage regardless of their capacity for harm

Or take mercury, that meddling destroyer of brain tissue. When mercury is attached to carbon, it is called methylmercury. If the mother’s blood is contaminated with trace amounts of methylmercury, the placenta will actively pump it into the fetal capillaries, as though it were a precious molecule of calcium or iodine. As the pregnancy continues, the mercury levels in umbilical cord blood eventually surpass their levels in the mother’s blood.

Of course, the placenta carries oxygen as well as food and water to the developing embryo. A pregnant woman is, therefore, not only part of the water cycle and food chain, she is part of the atmosphere as well. Frederica Perera, Ph.D., and her colleagues at Columbia University have recently discovered an important association between air pollution and birth weight. Specifically, pregnant women in Poland exposed to high levels of PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, such as soot, car exhaust, tobacco smoke) gave birth to smaller infants. What makes Perera’s study unique is that she actually measured fetal exposure to air pollution and found that newborns with the highest exposures had the smallest birth weights and head circumferences. This is a significant finding because smaller head size correlates with lower intelligence and poor cognitive functioning.

An Army of Mothers

Pregnancy is a brief time, and women cannot afford to wait until all the evidence is in before taking action to protect our babies-to-be and the first environment in which they live – our own bodies. Poet Audre Lorde, who died of breast cancer in 1993, imagined an army of one-breasted Amazons descending upon Congress to insist on a toxic-free environment. She recognized that the problem of air, water and food contamination is too large for any of us to fix alone and too pervasive for any of us to opt out of by escape into so-called "lifestyle" changes. We should applaud the new direction of research, as exemplified by the new center to evaluate environmental threats to human reproduction by the National Toxicology Program and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. But as with civil rights and women’s rights, the right to a healthy environment will only be won through political action.

As a new mother and former cancer patient, I would like to see the ranks of Lorde’s army of Amazons swollen with pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers. My 15-week-old fetus with the "unremarkable" chromosomes is now a 13-month-old toddler with a mind of her own. The amniotic fluid that once washed through her body ended up on the floorboards of my living room the day before labor started, and her placenta is now buried in her grandparents’ backyard. But the air, food and water they carried are still contained inside her body, my daughter Faith. I hope we both have a lot of years of unremarkable chromosomes ahead of us. Fighting for the right to a healthy environment would go a long way in ensuring that we do.

What You Can Do to Help Protect Your Child’s First Environment:

Find out what toxic chemicals are in your local environment. Go to the Scorecard kept by Environmental Defense. Type in your zip code to find citizen right-to-know data on toxic releases to air, water and soil. Armed with the facts, organize your community and confront corporate polluters. For help, contact the Center for Health and Environmental Justice (CHEJ).

Join the fight for a worldwide ban on the production of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), such as PCBs and DDT. The International POPs Elimination Network is spearheading the effort to see that the international treaty to ban POPs will force a real phase-out of these chemicals – not just more regulations governing their use. Contact Physicians for Social Responsibility or CHEJ.

Begin a dialogue with midwives, nurses, obstetricians, and La Leche League groups about the idea that women’s bodies are the first environment.

Take inspiration from Katsi Cook, a Mohawk midwife who is leading the fight against PCB contamination in mother’s milk on the Aksesasne Reservation along the St. Lawrence River in New York and Quebec. A profile of her is included in Winona LaDuke’s All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Consortium Books, 1999).

This article is also adapted from Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood, by Sandra Steingraber (Perseus Books, 2001)

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