In More than Genes (Reviews, Aug. 24), Dan Agin says babies are being exposed to environmental toxins before birth—sometimes with severe consequences

You say we are surrounded by toxins that can harm a fetus. How toxic is the U.S. compared with other countries?

That's a difficult question to answer because we don't have as many regulations as the Europeans do, but that doesn't mean that the Europeans are exposed to less than we are. What we can say, I think, is that industrialized countries are exposed to extreme toxic dangers. For example, flame retardants are used in furniture that's in everyone's house in any industrialized country. But they banned PCBs in flame retardants because they are toxic, and they're also toxic for the fetus. The chemical industry very quickly substituted bromine for chlorine in the compound [PBBs], and it took a while to find out that even those chemicals are toxic. Now in a journal called Environmental Health Perspectives there's a paper about the new substitute for PBBs—they find that that's toxic.

So what's a pregnant woman to do?

The fact is that we have an enormous problem with fetal alcohol syndrome—26% of women in this country are still drinking after they get pregnant. And that's not even mentioning the women who drink and don't know that they're pregnant yet. The first thing is to educate women that they really have to become responsible about these things. Otherwise, they're playing a roulette game with the health of their children.

Could health-care reform help in terms of poor pregnant women getting care?

Yeah. I think that we should make prenatal care absolutely free to anybody who's pregnant, no questions asked.

A pregnant woman can not drink or smoke, but she can't control the air and water.

Towns and villages can certainly increase the degree to which they watch for contaminants in their water supply. We also have federal solutions. For instance, one problem is cleaning up the lead in the environment, especially in the soil. That's a tremendously expensive thing to do, and it can only be done by the federal government. Right now, what disturbs me the most is that the EPA and the CDC don't do enough in public service advertising on television and on billboards to get people to focus on what they can do personally to avoid contamination. Some people will say I'm just a fear-monger. But I don't see how we can get a country of this size moving unless people get afraid.