The nurturing environment of the mother’s womb during pregnancy allows for Nature’s imperative to unfold in the form of a fully developed frontal brain, the prefrontal cortices will only develop fully if the nurturing bond between mother and child is unbroken during the first year. This is not a conscious process to be controlled by the mother or child, but a biological process of DNA responding to the environment to build neural structures and brain-heart connections needed to thrive or survive.

It isn’t that the infant inutero has to be conscious or sentient or anything else, it’s what does the DNA want to do inutero?  This wondrous bond according to the nature of the environment it’s in and the whole issue is that the mother’s emotional state is the environment that the infant is in because the emotional state means a particular hormonal state, a state of certain chemicals in that mother’s body and inutero which creates a certain environment.  The mother’s not consciously deliberately aware of that or bringing it about, nor is the infant, sentient or consciously making a response.  These are purely biological responses.
And if the mother is in a safe nurturing environment of her own or if she has the inner capacity to feel safe within herself regardless of her outer environment, all that happens is that the infant within her responds according to the environment it’s in and you build an intelligent system based on a safe, benevolent, loving, nurturing, caring environment.  And this is a purely biological response.  The mother can’t think herself into that.  The infant doesn’t think itself into that.  Intellect doesn’t enter into this thing.  You’re talking about a biological response of DNA to its environment.  Well you discover that all mammals determined the shape and character of the brain system of the infants they give birth to. Any mammal on earth feels themselves in a safe nurturing protective environment, anxiety free environment.  They give birth with an enlarged frontal lobe or what we call the forebrain and a reduced size hindbrain.  The hind brain is the oldest of the brain systems in our body.  It’s really inherited from the reptilian amphibian period of evolution, whereas the forebrain is the latest evolution in that addition of the brain, what makes us human and compassionate and loving and so on.  And the discovery that this is throughout the whole mammal kingdom, we’re simply glorified forms of mammals anyway, but we’re subject to the same thing.

If a mother feels within herself a security, safety, a freedom from anxiety, the infant she gives birth to will have a higher, more advanced evolutionary brain and a reduced sized survival brain, the ancient survival brain.  If she feels herself under threat, if she’s anxiety ridden in her pregnancy, than the environment the infant has is obsolete and you’ll have a much enlarged survival brain to try to deal with a hostile world and a reduced intellectual creative human brain.  Why, because you’re not going to need as much of that as you’re going to need of the survival brain.  So certainly the mother determines the type of brain structure that her infant is going to have when it’s born.  This has a tremendous impact on the fourth neural structure in the human being which is the prefrontal cortices, right behind our forehead.  Now that’s the largest part of the whole brain.  It’s larger than any other part of the brain.  But this grows, not in-utero where what we think of as the ordinary forebrain and hindbrain grow, which is determined by the mother’s emotional state, but the growth of the prefrontal cortices which is what makes us unique, human overall the other mammal species, the prefrontal cortices grow primarily after birth because otherwise the head would be so huge you’d have real troubles with birth.  And so if that nurturing environment is broken at birth and does not carry through in the post birth period, after birth, then the prefrontal cortices will be seriously malformed.  They will not receive the appropriate nurturing which they have to have for their own enfolding and development.

So above all the mother could breed a larger forebrain but that still doesn’t guarantee the appearance of the prefrontal lobes which occur after birth.  The prefrontals grow in about the first 9 to 12 months after birth and that’s what really determines the highest levels of human experience rather than just sort of another human animal.