Early life, risk and blame: Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) in the news, 1988–2023

This article traces evolving understandings of risk in pregnancy and early development by exploring 35 years of media reporting on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD), an influential biomedical field. DOHaD transformed expert and lay understandings of risk by studying impacts of early life experiences on the risk of adult chronic disease. This article draws on a Discourse-Historical approach and uses the coverage of DOHaD as a case study to examine how understandings of risk have evolved and been mediated through language in the UK, US and Australian media. The analysis detects a major shift in the coverage. While reporting initially focused on some risks of early experiences for adult disease, with time the media identified a growing range of risks and harms for the future health of the foetus. The expansion of ideas of what constitutes a risk was associated with new attributions of blame, initially singling out mothers, but increasingly also grandmothers and fathers, as responsible for the health of future generations. These findings highlight the social and cultural context as well as discursive practices that brought about the expansion of the meaning of risk and blame in relation to early life development, pointing to widespread societal concerns about reproduction.