When Laurence Cohen walks into Montreal’s General Jewish Hospital, she remembers seeing the whole hospital plunged in the dark, safe for flashlight beams.
That’s where she gave birth to her second son Nathan on Jan. 15, 1998 — in the middle of a historic ice storm.
“It’s not how you plan to welcome a child and give birth,” she said. “The ice, the snow — it looked like the apocalypse.”
Cohen, 49, said she was originally due on Jan. 5 and was already dilated two centimetres when the storm hit. She said she was terrified of giving birth in those conditions, especially after losing power.
She, her husband, their toddler and both sets of parents moved into her husband’s grandmother’s apartment — which still had power — as she was out of town, and waited for the storm to pass.
“What was difficult for me was I was so stressed because to give birth in these conditions would be a nightmare,” said Cohen.
Cohen gave birth the day after her home got its electricity back.
“It’s crazy how the mind works, I was able to not deliver for 10 days. I really said, ‘I’m not going to deliver until I’m back home and have electricity,'” she said.
“I was with my little suitcase for the baby for 10 days, living like this, plus having a young child. Everything turned out to be OK but it was like we were in a war. It was very scary.”
Though the birth went smoothly — she delivered the child in 11 minutes — she says her son was “born stressed.”
“I read that, years later, they did studies on babies born during that period, that they were more nervous and anxious,” she said.
“I had this guilt that I communicated all this stress to him in his last days in the womb, but it was scary,” said Cohen.
“Even getting to the maternity ward that night, all the lights were off and we used flashlights, they were keeping the electricity they used at a minimum because the hospital was working on generators.”
Ice-storm babies
Suzanne King, a researcher at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, has been researching the effects of stress on pregnant women and their children. She asked women to recall stressful experiences from their pregnancies decades later, which she said wasn’t ideal.
When the ice storm hit, she saw it as a perfect opportunity to follow women and their children over several years, she told CBC’s Radio Noon.
When getting her own blood pressure taken shortly after the storm ended, King said “it was off the scales I couldn’t believe it. But I felt calm.”
“It occurred to me, this is stress and if I’m stressed, then there’s a whole lot of pregnant women out there who are also stressed.… The women didn’t bring this ice storm on themselves, it was uncontrollable and sudden.”
The research followed the children of nearly 100 families between the ages of 6 months and 19 years old. They gathered information on the women’s experiences of the storm — like how long they went without electricity, social support and general outlook on the experience — and followed up with them every two years.
King was amazed by the significance of the data gathered by Project Ice Storm. The levels of stress experienced by the women affected many aspects of the children’s development, including cognitive, motor, behavioral and physical, the research showed.
However, King is hesitant to make too many assumptions about a child’s development being influenced by maternal stress alone.
“We can never look at any one kid and say, ‘Oh the reason they’re like this is the ice storm during the pregnancy,'” she said.
“The genes that they get from their parents are way more important in determining what the child will be like.”
Still, she said, although genes and DNA can’t be changed, how they’re expressed can.
For example, how long pregnant women went without electricity made a difference in children’s IQ, body mass index, immune functions, insulin secretion and risk of diabetes. These effects lasted at least into adolescence, said King.
“I think this liberates moms, it wasn’t their fault how many days they were without electricity, and so they can not feel guilty about that,” she said.
King said half the women followed by the researchers found positive experiences in the ice storm, while the other half felt neutral or negative. Those with more positive reactions told stories of getting together with their communities, fellowship and helping each other out.
King is now studying women who were pregnant during the pandemic, and have already found that those who can find something positive from the experience have less postpartum stress, she said.
“The take-home message from Project Ice Storm is that you can’t avoid a natural disaster,” said King.
“But in situations like the ice storm, they can try to keep a positive outlook and social support. We keep seeing in our studies that if you can rely on people and have good social support, the effects are much lower.”
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