Our current understanding of the life-long effects of prenatal exposure to maternal stress hormones has many practical implications. The first duty of all those who meet pregnant women is to protect their emotional state. In the age of routine medicalized prenatal care the attitudes of health professionals can have powerful effects on the emotional states of pregnant women. Thus the main preoccupation, even the zeal of doctors, midwives and other specialized professionals should be to avoid the “nocebo effect” during prenatal visits.19 In practice, this means that they must create such interactions that a pregnant woman feels even happier after a prenatal visit than before… or at least less anxious. This will not be easy as long as the dominant style of prenatal care is to routinely offer all pregnant women a standardized battery of tests, thus turning every prenatal visit into an opportunity to realize all the risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth. There are reasons today to reconsider the contents of antenatal visits and to shift towards a selective attitude.