Two years ago, a NYTimes Magazine story about the possible links between maternal and childhood obesity prompted UMass pediatric cardiologist Darshak Sanghavi, to raise some questions on Slate.

(P)inning complex public-health problems, like childhood obesity, on failed gestation has a blame-the-victim undercurrent. Though the supporting research is often weak, this view may encourage inaction: More support for kids, the thinking goes, might not alter the fate set in motion by irresponsible wombs.

Now the author of that Times story, Annie Murphy Paul, had written an entire book on the subject: Origins: How the Nine Months before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.

In a NY Times Book Review – written by another Mass doc — Jerome Groopman said the two writers met after the Slate column ran.

Paul writes how she invited Sanghavi out to breakfast, and here makes it clear that she does not believe that the new data on the fetal origins of adult disease means we should give up on trying to improve lives after birth. “Prenatal experience doesn’t force the individual down a particular path,” she writes. “At most, it points us in a general direction, and we can take another route if we choose. Imagine water flowing downstream: prenatal influences might dig a canal, so to speak, making it easier for the water to flow one way rather than another.” With effort, “we may be able to channel our fates in a different direction. The theory of fetal origins ought to contribute to complexity, not reduce it; if we take care in how we think about prenatal influences, they may add another layer to our understanding of who we are and how we got to be this way.”

More from Paul, also on Slate.