Psychosomatic Medicine 22:373-375 (1960)
© 1960 American Psychosomatic Society

The Relation Between Intention to Conceive and Symptoms During Pregnancy

A Preliminary Report

¹ The Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, the University of California Department of Psychology, Children's Hospital of the East Bay, and the Palo Alto Medical Clinic

The primary finding we report is a relationship between choice with regard to pregnancy and the development of symptoms during pregnancy. In three groups consisting of 18 mothers of schizophrenic children, 37 mothers of moderately disturbed children, and 28 mothers of children without known emotional disturbance, no significant differences were found in the number of symptoms during pregnancy claimed by the three groups. There was also no difference between the groups in the tendency to plan or not to plan pregnancies. The difference found thus occurs across groups and relates intention to conceive (or lack of such intention) to symptom development during pregnancy.

Although the finding reported above is intriguing, it should be noted that there are a number of limitations to the study. The data are retrospective, that is, mothers are reporting events--in this case, planning of pregnancy and symptoms during pregnancy--several years after their occurrence. Recollection of these events may be significantly distorted by subsequent events, particularly by development of emotional disturbance in the child.

Other limitations are the relatively small samples, the high proportion of the total sample made up of mothers of disturbed children, and the lack of specificity regarding what is a "planned" pregnancy ("planned" by wife, by husband, with what degree of agreement and commitment?). It is obvious that all reports of planning of pregnancy will be retrospective and that the reports must of necessity be given in a social context that will have a bearing on what is reported. It was our hope that the two questions of significance in the present study, having been imbedded in a questionnaire that covered many areas, would produce less self-conscious replies. This cannot of course be taken for granted.

In a subsequent study, we plan to make a more adequate test of the hypothesis. It is our intention to collect data regarding planning of pregnancy and symptoms during pregnancy from a large sample of women without known emotional disturbance who are in their eighth month of pregnancy. This does not obviate the problem that a difficult pregnancy would be recalled as unplanned. It does, however, reduce some of the memory factors, and it is possible that information on planning could be obtained from attending obstetricians considerably earlier in the pregnancy.

We report this preliminary finding in the hope that investigators in this area may frame researches with this possibility in mind because, as mentioned in the review of the literature, the data were available in previous studies, but this particular relationship was not tested.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				D. B. Carlson and R. C. Labarba Maternal Emotionality During Pregnancy and Reproductive Outcome: A Review of the Literature International Journal of Behavioral Development, December 1, 1979; 2(4): 343 - 376. [Abstract] [PDF]