man nature shapes and is shaped by context, "undergoing transformation through participation in an evolving intentional world that is the product of the mental representations that make it up" (Shweder, 1990, p. 22). Despite disagreements and competing views on a variety of issue fronts, a fairly significant body of research and theory deals with the development of the ability of infants and children to experience and express emotions in optimal ways. What does appear to be widely agreed, is that impacts on emotional development of newborns begin well before live birth and persist from the earliest period of infant life well into childhood, and in some cases into adulthood. As a practical matter, the physical organism must be considered as a principal context for the whole project of human development.
It may seem difficult to pinpoint with clinical accuracy how the connection between drugs consumed by a mother during pregnancy--whether illegal or prescribed substances--and emotional development achieved status in the community of research problems associated with understanding and facilitation of optimal early-stage life experience. However, in the popular imagination in the modern period, the impact of two drugs in particular on the likelihood of birth defects appears to have been decisive. The first was a sedative called thalidomide, which as Rubin (1995) points out, fostered a "tragedy" in the late 1950s and early 1960s because of the limbless babies born to women who had consumed the drug during pregnancy. The second was diethylstilbestrol, or DES, a drug that was initially thought to diminish chances of miscarriage but that was later implicated in a whole range of long-term physical risks to female offspring, notably early onset of cervical cancer (Cloitre & Others, 1988).
Since the 1960s, a whole range of other studies have linked fetal defects with everything from German measles to tobacco, alcohol, heroin, and cocaine con...