Connecting With Her Before Birth

By Henrieta Haniskova, Former Nurse, Certified Clinical Aromatherapist, and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner

Stretch marks were the reason, at first. I used to rub my belly to keep them away, and I could feel the shape of her under my hand, her back, right there. She would go still and calm while I rubbed. The second I stopped, she started kicking, right on cue, like she was annoyed with me for quitting. So I tried it again on purpose, just to see if she would do it again. She did. Every single time. It was hilarious, and it was also the moment I realized: this girl could feel my hand, and she liked it.

This started a playful communication between us. I learned that my baby was a fruit fly, getting super excited every time I ate peaches and strawberries, her favorite. She enjoyed my voice, and my touch through my belly calmed her down.

You have probably been kicked in the ribs a few times by now, man it hurts! Babies sure have their ways of communicating even from the womb.

Turns out I was not imagining it, and neither are you if this has already happened to you.

Your baby can feel your touch long before they can hear you.

That is not folklore. A Korean physician named Sajudang Lee wrote almost the same thing down in 1800, in the first book ever written about preparing for motherhood. She had no equipment to prove it. Just mothers telling her the same thing, over and over: their own state of mind reached their babies before birth. She called it jon-sim, a settled mind, and she gave women real, doable ways to get there, talking to the baby, reading aloud, choosing calm on purpose.

A century and a half later, a Dutch doctor working with trauma survivors landed on the same idea from a completely different direction. Frans Veldman called it haptonomy: touch as an actual conversation with someone who cannot talk back yet. Rest your hand somewhere on your belly, without trying to get a response, and just wait. Most parents notice the same thing within a week or two: their baby starts answering, consistently, to that exact hand in that exact place.

How does it feel to just rest your hand there?

Do you enjoy connecting with your baby and learning their personality too?

Did you know your baby's hearing does not switch on until around 27 weeks? Even then it is not sharp, mostly rhythm, pitch, the rise and fall of a voice, filtered through everything in between. But that is apparently enough. In one study, a group of pregnant women read their baby the same short rhyme every day for a month. After birth, those babies' heart rates changed at the sound of that one rhyme, and only that one. Not a coincidence. A memory, made before a single day outside the womb.

There is real science behind it too, not just tenderness. Before your baby's own brain can make enough serotonin on its own, the placenta steps in and makes its own supply, feeding the parts that are still under construction. Most of what we know comes from animal studies so far. Human research is still catching up.

What we know for sure: your body is your baby's home. That is all they know of the world right now.

You are also their only connection to the world outside. Real stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, do cross the placenta, though your body buffers a good deal of it before it reaches your baby. So without knowing anything about what is actually happening around you, your baby is still picking up the chemistry of how you feel.

The feel-good hormones cross the placenta too.

I keep saying pleasure is not indulgence. It is nervous system regulation. A woman who focuses on her pleasure feels more regulated, period. And science backs it up: mothers who felt real satisfaction, optimism, and everyday wellbeing had longer pregnancies, higher birth weight, and steadier emotional development in their babies later on. Simply avoiding stress was not enough on its own. And as they say, practice makes perfect. Turns out pleasure practices make for a more regulated mother.

It was the touch that reached her. Bump Butter is what I made to carry that same ritual: real, and built specifically for your hand to come back to, every night.

The Threshold series continues next week.