How the Fencing Reflex Connects Life and Death
By the seventh month of my pregnancy, I sometimes felt a stroking motion on the inside of my abdomen, a repeated arc of movement traced by a tiny limb.
My daughter Lucy weighed 6 pounds when she was born two months later. My father’s side of the family often produces small babies. Too small to regulate her own body temperature, she needed to be held in order to sleep. She was “living on” me, the pediatrician said.
Sometimes to free up my hands I would lay her along my thighs, the dip between them holding her snug. Her wrinkled arms and legs stayed drawn in to her chest, but then one arm and leg would extend, the arm reaching out in front of her and sweeping out to the side, taking in the expanse of the room until she lay twisted like an archer. The motion already was familiar to me: the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex.
When a baby’s head is turned to one side, the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex prompts the infant into the archer’s pose. One arm extends, while the opposite arm and leg flex. This reflex begins about 18 weeks after conception and helps the baby to make her way down the birth canal. Outside the womb, the fencing (or archer’s) reflex allows the baby to discover her hands and develop hand-eye coordination.
When my parents came to New York to meet Lucy, she lay in the crook of my father’s arm, tracing her
