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 "Are you scared?"
The question, by a stranger who noticed my swollen belly, caught me off guard.
I have a son - a month shy of his fifth birthday - and I'm having another - "any day now," my obstetrician told me this week, although the due date's not until July 31. Having done this before, I didn't think of myself as scared.
Anxious? Sure.
Uncomfortable? You don't know the half of it.
But scared? Well, of course, I am!
The miracle of birth is not just that babies develop and survive. The miracle is that mothers do, too.
There's a reason that grandmothers and great-grandmothers - especially in the days before epidurals - likened childbirth to a near-death experience. It's the reason why some of us - myself, included - risk rare-but-possible paralysis from a spinal injection of painkillers at the height of a contraction.
Scared? Are you kidding? Ha.
But I can't dwell on fear. Which is why I'd finally learned to tune out many studies whose conclusions were disproven over time. But in recent months, just as I seem to notice every pregnant woman in the grocery store or at the mall, I've also inadvertently paid more attention to headlines about pregnant women, babies and hazards:
High infant mortality rates for babies born to black women in the United States. Too few babies breast-fed exclusively for six months. Increased risk of heart attacks among pregnant women 30 or older.
I was greeted before and after the birth of my firstborn with contradictory admonitions about breast-feeding, sleeping positions, car seats, crying, germs ... you name it. Now, I'm again sorting out which research to believe and which to discard.
Recent studies link a baby's birthweight to his shyness as an adult. Others explore how medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) could increase a child's chances of being underweight (and a lack of medication could increase that child's chances of obesity), and the gender research is overwhelming.
 We already knew that preschool matters - for boys and girls. Research has shown that girls who attend preschool are more likely to graduate from high school than girls who do not, and boys who attend preschool are less likely to be arrested or abuse drugs.
But did you know that a recent study showed boys who attend preschool classes with mostly girls get an "intellectual boost" by the end of the school year? (And, ahem, they tend to fall behind when the class is a majority of boys.)
Then there are the recalls and the bold-label warnings. Is organic baby formula safe? And what's this about making sure that any bottles are BPA-free? That's free of the chemical bisphenol-a (BPA), which is used to make hard, clear plastic bottles.
The National Toxicology Program in the United States this spring released a report that some rats fed or injected low doses of the chemical reached puberty early, and developed precancerous tumors and urinary tract infections. The "possibility that bisphenol-a may alter human development," the report said, "cannot be dismissed."
How could I dismiss a conclusion like that?
But not all of the news is distressing. I actually smiled when I read about one study. Published in the July issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the study confirms an intuitive, common-sense certainty: "When first-time mothers see their own infant's face, an extensive brain network seems to be activated ... "
In other words, as one headline said: "Baby's smile lights up mom's brain." Well, of course.
Researchers used MRI scans to confirm that certain parts of a mother's brain are activated by her baby's smile. Also not surprisingly, the study concluded that a crying baby did not produce the same response.
That natural stimulus is just one of the bountiful rewards a mother gets for enduring near-death pain and, er, fear. The study targeted first-time mothers, but I'm sure this second time around will prove the same effect. Any day now.
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