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If not, then does the fetus develop its own consciousness?

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The idea that a functioning consciousness could exist in a fetus was in conflict with everything he had been taught in medical school.  But even more than that, the possibility that he could be aware of subtle nuances in the interactions between himself and his mother during this period of his life astonished him.  Still, he could not deny the concrete nature of these experiences.  All of it presented the scientist in him with a very serious conflict; everything he was experiencing went against everything he "knew."  Then a solution to the conflict presented itself to him and everything became very clear: It was necessary to revise his present scientific beliefs--something that he knew had happened many times to others in the course of history--rather than to question the relevance of his own experience.

For the psychiatrist who experienced all this, more questions than answers came forth in the months ahead.  It might have been easy to dismiss much of what he had experienced if his experience had only been intellectual.  Intellectual understanding could have come from books or films.  But something more than this had occurred.  More than anything else his experiences had been sensual--extraordinary physical sensations, filled with feelings of strange textures, the light and the dark of life.  He had felt the sickness caused by the toxins that had bombarded him in the womb, and then the inexplicable clearing.

Granted, some information about this realm might have come from books he had read or films he had seen, but what was the source of his minutely detailed sensations?  How could he have known the feelings of the fetal period of his life?  Clearly, his consciousness was providing him with amazingly detailed, complex, and concrete information that he had never dreamed possible.
-Chapter 2 'Wholeness and the Amniotic Universe' from The Holotropic Mind, The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and how They Shape our Lives, Stanislav Grof, M.D.

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