The baby is connected to the mother's placenta for months, maybe information could be transmitted then. I've never heard anything to support that idea, though!
This always seemed like one of those little biological details, like the well known example of that nerve which loops all the way down a giraffe's neck and back again in order to connect two regions only a few inches apart, that shows that nature doesn't refactor.
Because it seems like such a waste of the opportunity afforded by extended physical secueity and direct connection between mother and developing child, that some means of transferring a portion of the mother's learned knowledge, or at least some coarse grained abstraction of it, to the fetus, has never developed.
The lazy dismissal of this question is just to say, if nature needed it, it would have evolved it, but this doesn't seem to hold in every case [0]. It seems rather that there was no way for such a capability to be built out of extending existing mechanisms, with the major barrier being the absence of nerve tissue in the umbilical cord, where higher level CNS connectivity might have evolved from as a foothold
[0] and certainly doesn't account for what may happen in the future unless nature is completely done developing everything that could be developed. Nor does it incorporate the idea that human manipulation of our own biology is not itself also part of nature.
Wellcome. Sometimes it may happen that familiar stem cells cross maternal-fetal barrier in placenta, persist somehow and start to function regardless, where stem cells are needed - usually in younger sibling coming from the older, in place of original cells, even in the brain - forming part of it as of another person (more or less) - interconnected but not the same..
In addition, most parts of the first cell of what will become a baby, come from the mother. This includes all DNA in mitochondria and another organelle that I don't remember the name.
