“…culties in their offspring and attributed these problems to "the development prenatally of an irritable and hyperactive autonomic nervous system" (Sontag, 1941(Sontag, , p. 1001. During the next 4 decades, numerous studies documented a wide range of prenatal stress-induced effects on the developing fetus and infant (Field, Sandberg, Quetel, Garcia, & Rosario, 1985;Nuckolls, Cassel, & Kaplan, 1972;Ottinger & Simmons, 1964;Stott, 1959;Ward, 1972; Williamson, LeFevre, & Hector, 1989). In studies with rodents, stress during pregnancy was reported to result in low birth weight and early motor retardation (Fride & Weinstock, 1984), deficits in discrimination learning (Grimm & Frieder, 1987), feminization of the male fetus (Ward, 1972), and increased anxiety under conditions of novelty (Fride, Dan, Gavish, & Weinstock, 1985).…”