Wondering about wine, women, and pregnancy (by wine-blog.org)

Drinking during your pregnancy…what should you believe?

 

Have you ever wondered about wine, women, and pregnancy? This has been going on with me since the warnings first began to emerge in the 1980s… By then, I had already had three happy, healthy daughters, and I was an occasional wine drinker during the 70s through 1980, when I gave birth to my third and final daughter.

For instance, I wonder how Europeans even have any population left at all, considering that they don’t have the same prohibitions in place against all wine during pregnancy… And, I wonder how I gave birth to these three really gorgeous, talented, and smart daughters, considering that I occasionally had a bit of wine while carrying each one?

I’m not going on record as advocating for having a bit of wine while you’re pregnant. Each woman has to make her own decisions about that one.

I do enjoy studying this one, however.

A bit of Prohibitionism background, from my life’s chair… by Dr. Peggy Drexler Nov. 17, 2012; author, research psychologist and gender scholar, published by the Huffington Post, entitled, “A Loaded Question: On Drinking While Pregnant. ”

Until the early 1970s, moderate drinking while pregnant was both common and, for the most part, unquestioned. Many share stories of how their own mothers drank or smoked throughout their pregnancies, a cultural standard revisited in television shows like Mad Men, in which a very pregnant Betty Draper is seen smoking in the maternity ward. In 1973, however, a University of Washington study identified a group of physical and mental birth defects caused by drinking alcohol, together now known as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, or FAS. Though studies showing that FAS was a very rare outcome of largely severe alcoholism emerged as early as 1980 — with numbers never rising over 1 case in 1,000 — FAS as a notion was transformative.

According to a 1999 report published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism, FAS was key in turning excessive drinking from a moral (and largely private, family) concern to a viable public health matter, and by the 1990s was widely associated with child neglect and abuse, poverty, rising crime, and mental illness. In 1990, Wyoming became the first state to charge a drunk pregnant woman with felony child abuse.

Here’s one source, a Danish study, that has a European perspective and is close to my own personal beliefs… Again, each pregnant woman must make up her own mind and not be swayed by anything I’m personally writing. I have no academic studies on this on… I’m just wondering out loud and giving you links for your own considerations:

 

Read on …