I was also interested in Time’s cover article about the impact of the first nine months of life (which is to say, life in the womb) on our health throughout the rest of our lives: How the First Nine Months Shape the Rest of Your Life. But lest we think this is just a way to make pregnant women feel more anxious and guilty about how they are treating the unborn child within, Annie Murphy Paul follows up with a post on Motherlode: A Womb With a View, in which she explains to Lisa Belkin, “blame the mother” would be a shortsighted and off-the-mark use for all this emerging data. Instead, she says, most of the things that can go wrong in pregnancy are “collective in nature (matters of food safety, environmental pollution, safety in disaster situations, and so on) and require collective solutions — not more responsibility and blame piled on individual pregnant women for situations they can’t possibly rectify on their own.”