Being pregnant today means obeying an increasing variety of rules. No smoking, drinking, or recreational drugs; avoiding particular foods; worrying concerning hair dye; worrying concerning prescription drugs—in fact, worrying concerning most things. Including worrying concerning worrying—due to the fact that tension is supposed to be poor for a making fetus too.
Most of the rules concerning pregnancy behavior purport to be based on science. For example, pregnant women are told to prevent soft cheese, unpasteurized milk, raw fish, bagged salad. And of course, everyone from national agencies to the local midwife will certainly now tell you that drinking alcohol in pregnancy poses the risk that the fetus will certainly produce fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD)—a wide-ranging diagnosis that is said to encompass various degrees of “vision impairment, sleep problems, heart defects, liver problems, bad immune system, speech and language delays, impulsivity, memory problems, hyperactivity [and] inappropriate social behaviour.”
While there is evidence that fairly heavy drinking can easily damage the fetus, the findings of studies attempting to measure the harm from reduced to moderate levels of alcohol consumption have actually been equivocal, even contradictory. Meanwhile, a modification to official UK guidance from no a lot more compared to a couple of glasses a week to none at every one of wasn’t based on any sort of brand-new evidence. The prevailing pointer is that you shouldn’t drink “merely to be on the safe side.”
There are several reasons why birth defects could develop—and often, the precise induce is unknown. For example, the NHS states that in most cases of congenital heart disease, “no obvious cause… is identified.” These troubles can easily additionally happen whether a woman drinks some alcohol in pregnancy or not. Yet for organizations such as the FASD Trust, any sort of consumption of alcohol is assumed to be the cause: “FASD is a collection of preventable birth defects caused entirely by a woman drinking alcohol at any sort of time throughout her pregnancy, regularly even prior to she knows that she is pregnant.”
Claims concerning alcohol consumption in pregnancy (and exactly how much) are riven along with confusions over correlation and causation. Yet despite evidence suggesting that reduced to moderate levels of alcohol consumption during pregnancy are benign, official suggestions has actually become increasingly precautionary. “I want pregnant women to be fairly clear that they must prevent alcohol as a precaution,” Sally Davies, England’s chief medical officer, has actually said. “Despite the fact that the risk of harm to the baby is reduced if they have actually drunk small quantities of alcohol prior to becoming aware of the pregnancy, there is no ‘safe’ degree of alcohol to drink as soon as you are pregnant.”
This precautionary tips is not restricted to the UK. The abstinence message was initial used in the US, where pregnant women suspected of alcohol or drug “abuse” throughout pregnancy can easily discover themselves arrested, incarcerated, or subjected to compulsory treatment, under threat of having their youngsters removed. Yet as National Advocates for Pregnant Women, an organization that campaigns tirelessly for the rights of pregnant women, has pointed out that “media hype and enduring myths” surrounding alcohol and drug usage in pregnancy are “not supported by science.”
In Scandinavian countries, which are regularly presumed to be strongly supportive of women’s rights and a lot more liberal in their approach to personal behavior, tips to pregnant women has actually additionally taken the line that, while there is no evidence of harm from prenatal exposure to alcohol, pregnant women are warned not to drink, due to the fact that “why take chances?”
This turn to precautionary suggestions about drinking in pregnancy is deeply problematic due to the fact that it borrows the authority of science devoid of conclusively showing evidence for induce and effect, due to an a priori assumption that it is wrong for pregnant women to drink any sort of alcohol.
Of course, this does not mean that pregnant women should drink alcohol in pregnancy. Yet this is something they have to decide for themselves.
The injunction that pregnant women have actually an obligation to prevent alcohol “merely in case” is bound up along with several various other examples of the increasingly aggressive policing of pregnancy and birth. Pregnant women are told, in myriad ways, that their own needs, desires, and feelings no longer count—“all that matters” is that they have actually a healthy and balanced baby. From just what they consume and drink to exactly how they feel and think, the message transmitted to pregnant women by our risk-averse parenting culture is that their behavior must be determined by fears concerning the effect on the fetus in their womb.
In this way, pregnant women are scared in to seeing themselves as second-class citizens pretty compared to autonomous individuals. And several women are gained to feel poor for not complying with the rules explicitly. This resulting blow to their autonomy is a far bigger problem for women, and their babies, compared to anything they could consume or drink as soon as pregnant.
