Thanks for these comments Melanie. I believe that the leap from the rat studies to the human studies has been quite challenging. As with many areas of social epi, it's almost like we have good evidence at two ends of the spectrum (eg experimental studies on animals, and observational studies on human populations), but we are missing the middle section of evidence because we cannot run experiments on humans. My view is that natural experiments are very promising to address this gap, but they are hard to find and get decent data on.
You might be interested in the ice-storm papers. I felt they analyzed the data incorrectly, so I don't trust the results but it's a great approach.
Laplante DP, Brunet A, Schmitz N, Ciampi A, King S. Project Ice Storm: Prenatal maternal stress affects cognitive and linguistic functioning in 5½-year-old children. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. 2008 Sep 30;47(9):1063-72. https://ucsf.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/CHI.0b013e31817eec80