Through this document, may we be allowed to evoke the life of a French pioneer in the field of motherhood: she brought to light the existence, for the unborn child, of a natural prenatal education during the mother’s pregnancy, and she devoted herself to spreading this knowledge.
Marie-Andrée Bertin, throughout her life, was at the service of society, and of young people in particular, through education.
After a career as Headmistress of a nursery school in Besançon, France, she retired in 1980 and wished to explore more deeply a subject that was close to her heart: how could mothers’ lived experiences influence the life of their unborn child?
This intuition came from her experience as a mother and grandmother, to which were added the observation of several generations of schoolchildren, contact with their parents, and participation in research on “The behavior of young children” with Professor Montagner at the University of Besançon.
Well trained in teamwork and pedagogical facilitation, as she had been responsible for teacher training in the Besançon education authority, Marie-Andrée Bertin gathered around her health and maternity professionals, teachers, and parents who, like her, were curious about the evolution of knowledge in the field of birth.
The study of specialized journals on maternal health and prenatal life led them to discover numerous works and observations, including those of obstetricians and psychiatrists: Dr. Thomas Verny, from the University of Toronto in Canada; Alfred Tomatis; Dr. Michel Odent; and Frédérick Leboyer, all active within APPPAH, the Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health. This provided substance and answers to the initial questions raised by Marie-Andrée Bertin and her study companions.
To this were added the ideas of a philosopher and educator, Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, who speaks of the “formative power of the pregnant woman” in his book An Education That Begins Before Birth. There was, in this, a remarkable convergence, a synergy between the philosophical, spiritual, and life-science domains.
This body of knowledge tends to show that, during prenatal life, the child builds the first foundations of health and affectivity, as well as cognitive faculties and relational capacities. Knowing this, the mother, the father, and their entire environment can act favorably for the best development of the unborn child.
For that time, this represented a new approach to pregnancy, considerably enriched by the factors that had been brought to light: the fetus is receptive and endowed with sensitivity; as its cells form, they memorize a large amount of information coming from the mother; through touch and speech, the mother and father can communicate with their baby; and a loving relationship can be established between them during fetal life. The mother’s imagination and positive thoughts toward her baby also contribute to the child’s sense of security. It follows that, during pregnancy, a genuine natural education takes place within the child, even without the mother and father being aware of it.
Marie-Andrée Bertin and her team decided to call this whole body of knowledge “Natural Prenatal Education” and, aware of the great benefits it could bring to families and to society as a whole, they decided to inform the public about it.
In 1982, they created ANEP-France, the National Association for Prenatal Education, whose aim was to “disseminate scientific and psychological information enabling young people to become responsible and future parents to foster optimal physical and psychological development in the unborn child.”
The first elected Board of Directors was made up of those who had participated in the research. Marie-Andrée Bertin was elected President, a role she would carry out brilliantly until 2012.
In 1983, she participated with eight ANEP members in an APPPAH Congress in Toronto. There, they met the researchers whose articles they had read: Thomas Verny, founder of APPPAH, and the American psychologist David Chamberlain. Prenatal Education and its representatives were received with enthusiasm, and Thomas Verny would become a partner in future Prenatal Education congresses.
A collaboration was established with APPPAH, as well as with ISPPM, the International Society of Prenatal Psychology and Medicine, led by Professor Fedor Freyberg, whom Marie-Andrée Bertin met in 1983 at an ISPPM Congress in Austria, where she presented Prenatal Education. Links were also established with Dr. Soldera, another researcher in prenatal psychology in Italy and founder of ANPEP.
The meetings with experts in prenatal medicine and psychology were decisive, and ANEP had the material needed to develop the content of Natural Prenatal Education so that it would be based on reliable information sources derived from research and scientific observation. This was a constant concern of ANEP’s founder.
From 1983 to 1990, Marie-Andrée Bertin, together with her teams, carried out lecture tours in the major regions of France. She addressed varied audiences: doctors, nurses, midwives, teachers, parents, and young people. She also gave radio and television interviews whenever possible.
As an educator, mother, and grandmother, she was deeply sensitive to the future of young people: they are the future parents, the bearers of tomorrow’s society. She knew how to awaken their interest whenever she had the opportunity to speak to them.
National and local fairs on health and nutrition also made it possible to present Prenatal Education and to exchange with a large public. Most people discovered, with interest, many things they had never heard of before, which led them to reflect on their lives and families, because all of us began our lives with those nine months of intrauterine life, during which we experienced so many things that are important for our future life.
In 1986, ANEP-France joined the World Movement of Mothers International, and Marie-Andrée Bertin was elected to its Board of Directors. A partnership was also organized with FIMB, Femmes Internationales Murs Brisés, in Perpignan, to share common areas of interest.
The time for broader dissemination materialized through three international symposia: in 1988 in Fréjus, in 1989 in Saint-Raphaël, and in 1990 at the Faculty of Medicine of the Sorbonne in Paris, where the auditorium gathered 300 people, 80% of whom were professionals. It was an encouraging success for the future of Prenatal Education.
From 1980 to 1991, requests for information and interventions arrived in order to establish associations in neighboring or more distant European countries: Norway, Portugal, and Russia.
Between the various trips, the President of ANEP also had to hold working meetings and board meetings, respond to a large volume of correspondence, closely monitor dissemination in France, maintain relations with partner associations, and, finally, continue updating Prenatal Education with new discoveries in neuroscience, such as mirror neurons and epigenetics.
Marie-Andrée Bertin seemed tireless, present at most events organized by ANEP and always ready to initiate new projects to carry this Prenatal Education further. She was deeply convinced that society as a whole had much to gain from it.
From 1982 to 1991, seven ANEP associations were created in Italy, Greece, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Portugal, and France. Their representatives, together with Mrs. Bertin and her team, prepared the statutes of an association.
This would become OMAEP, the World Organization of Associations for Prenatal Education, established under French law. Marie-Andrée Bertin was elected President until she passed the torch, a few years later, to the President of the Greek Association, Ioanna Mari.
The statutes provided that exchange and information seminars would bring together the member associations each year in one of the OMAEP countries.
The three-day world congresses would become major moments in the international dissemination of Prenatal Education.
The first took place in 1993 in Granada, Spain, on the theme “Prenatal Education: A Hope for the Future.” The second was held in Athens, Greece, in 1994, under the theme “Prenatal Education: From Ancient Greece to the Twenty-First Century.”
These congresses brought together prestigious experts in prenatal life and health at the time, including Professor Peter Fedor-Fryberg, gynecologist-obstetrician at the University of Stockholm, Sweden; Professor Marie-Claire Busnel, researcher at the CNRS in Paris; Dr. Michel Odent, from the Primal Health Research Institute in London; David Chamberlain, Doctor of Prenatal Psychology; Franz Veldman, founder of Haptonomy; as well as doctors and psychologists from Greece, Russia, Spain, and France. Key themes for Prenatal Education were addressed there.
In 1997, dissemination crossed the Atlantic. The President of ANEP Spain, Pilar Vizcaíno, accompanied Marie-Andrée Bertin on a three-week tour of Venezuela and Colombia, where a two-day congress was held in Caracas, 22 lectures were given, and numerous radio and television programs took place in both countries.
In 2005, the doors of the United Nations opened to OMAEP: it obtained NGO consultative status with ECOSOC, the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. It could thus have representatives in Geneva, New York, and Vienna, in order to intervene during sessions concerning family, education, and health; participate in conferences organized by other NGOs; and propose its own. These opportunities would be widely used throughout each year.
Prenatal Education thus experienced renewed momentum, with seven or eight representatives from the ANEP associations, including one from ANEP France who was present almost daily at the United Nations in Geneva. The founding President of OMAEP remained constantly informed about this new turning point in the dissemination of Prenatal Education and the direction of its initiatives.
OMAEP participated in ECOSOC in New York in 2013, during the Year of Women, by proposing the Global Prenatal Initiative “9 Months to Save the World.” OMAEP members, together with its representatives at ECOSOC, worked extensively on this event: texts, posters, and Marie-Andrée Bertin was still present.
After a great deal of lobbying work, OMAEP was able to have included in the Convention on the Rights of the Child the assurance of “the protection of the child during the prenatal period.”
In 2006, new work perspectives opened for the ANEP associations through the GRUNDTVIG Projects proposed by the European Commission. These projects concerned lifelong adult education. Marie-Andrée Bertin successively submitted two projects: “Discovery of Natural Prenatal Education,” 2006–2009; and “Training of Trainers and Disseminators of Prenatal Education Preparing for Parenthood,” 2009–2012.
These projects were designed and carried out in coordination with members of the ANEP associations from France, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Latvia.
In 2011–2013, Ioanna Mari, President of ANEP Greece and OMAEP, took over with the subject “Training Uniting Recent Science and Popular Traditions on Parenthood During the Prenatal Period,” with the same ANEP associations, plus the one from Belgium.
The major moments of these three-year projects were the transnational seminars, where the associations from partner countries met and exchanged with speakers and participants from the host country. There were always new things to discover.
Aix-en-Provence, Athens, Bucharest, Sofia, and Riga were the places where these fruitful meetings were held.
ANEP branches located in the Var, Alsace, the Paris region, Loire-Atlantique, and Haute-Savoie, led by local correspondents, organized dissemination in connection with Marie-Andrée Bertin, who was always concerned that Prenatal Education be transmitted without distortion.
Marie-Andrée Bertin had a considerable capacity for work. Highly organized, she gave more than one hundred lectures in France and around the world, while responding to requests for advice from associations already created or in the process of being formed, and offering an enlightened perspective in the preparation of OMAEP events throughout the world.
Despite her efforts and the successes achieved, she sometimes came up against walls of misunderstanding and the difficulties inherent in any organization.
She understood that every novelty can cause concern, that some innovations may even seem unacceptable, and that time is always necessary for the world to appropriate what is new.
Patiently, she resisted, thanks to her perseverance and to the presence around her of a few faithful companions who admired her qualities and the value that Prenatal Education represented for the world.
Over the years, an entire documentary collection was built up: brochures, booklets, congress proceedings, promotional leaflets, and DVDs with Marie-Andrée Bertin’s lectures, including “Education and World Peace,” recorded in a trilingual version, French, English, and Spanish, for international dissemination.
Above all, there is Marie-Andrée Bertin’s book, Natural Prenatal Education: A Hope for the Child, the Family and Society, published in 2003, then translated into the languages of several countries, updated, and republished in 2012 by Éditions du Dauphin. In it, Marie-Andrée Bertin presents the synthesis of her research and observations. It has now become a classic of Prenatal Education, to which it provides the first foundations.
Since then, other books have appeared, enriched by new studies and observations on prenatal life and parenthood.
From 2000 to 2012, new ANEP associations were officially established in many parts of the world.
In several countries of West Africa, ANEP associations were created: Benin, Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire; and Congo-Brazzaville organized its First Congress of Prenatal Education on October 27 and 28, 2010, in the presence of the Ministers of Health and Education.
In 2012, Marie-Andrée Bertin left the Presidency of ANEP at the age of 87, after 30 years of activity in the service of Prenatal Education. Twenty-three associations, spread across four continents and federated by OMAEP, had been established. However, the examination of her archives in 2023 proved that 43 associations had existed, 31 of which had been officially recognized by their countries.
Among them, some, although led by committed people, had ceased their activities due to life’s uncertainties, but the seeds had been sown.
After Ioanna Mari of Greece, Gheorghe Anton of Switzerland was elected President. Today, OMAEP, chaired by Dr. Lavinia Nanu of Romania, continues internationally to disseminate Prenatal Education, together with her team and the member associations.
It can be said that Marie-Andrée Bertin, always attentive to the scientific advances of her time, knew how to develop an innovative concept and a new discipline: Natural Prenatal Education, expressed in language accessible to everyone. Its practice does not require excessive expense, only some effort and goodwill.
She made Natural Prenatal Education known in France and around the world, and highlighted the need for future parents to prepare, as much as possible, for the birth of a child, long before conception.
In view of the crucial questions facing today’s society throughout the world, it is undeniable that this innovative view of motherhood, from before conception until the birth of the child, can contribute to building better physical and psychological health for the unborn child, foster peaceful relationships within the couple and family, and, consequently, improve relationships in all sectors of society.
Natural Prenatal Education is a true form of prevention for the physical and spiritual health of human beings.
After 2012, our happy retiree still participated in the preparation of several projects, keeping herself informed of the evolution of the large family that had formed around her and encouraging those who continued the work.
Marie-Andrée Bertin celebrated her hundredth birthday on December 17, 2025, at home, surrounded by her family and a few friends. Then, on January 7, 2026, she left this earth, where she had worked so much to improve the lives of human beings.
Many of those who worked with Marie-Andrée Bertin, or received her advice, keep an admiring and grateful memory of this elegant and graceful lady. She reflected the image of the Prenatal Education she presented: simple and accessible, attentive and benevolent in her listening, yet rigorous and firm in her words when it came to work. Jovial, she also had a sense of humor and was affable in her relationships.
We extend our most sincere thanks to Evelyn Lemoigne, from ANEP France, for writing this magnificent document, as well as to all those who also contributed to it.
Thank you very much.
OMAEP Board of Directors
English 
Français