Study: Middle-Class Women More Likely To Drink During Pregnancy

[The Straight Story]

ATLANTA (CBS Atlanta) - The findings of a recent study suggest that middle-class mothers-to-be are more likely to imbibe alcohol while pregnant than women from any other economic tier.

The UK Telegraph is reporting that college-educated, mature white women from affluent areas were the most prone to ignoring medical advise on the matter.

“Our findings suggest that women should be advised to abstain from alcohol when planning to conceive and throughout pregnancy,” researchers were quoted as saying.

Those involved in the study also asserted that their findings “highlight the need for endorsing the abstinence-only message, and further illuminate how timing of exposure is important in the association of alcohol with birth outcomes, with the first trimester being the most vulnerable period.”

http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2014/03/11/study-middle-class-women-more-likely-to-drink-during-pregnancy/

[hollysmom]

1. This is modern theory.

Now I am not going to have children so don't scream at me, but I find it hard to believe a couple of drinks a month is going to cause great damage - drinking every day or drinking more than one drink a day might,. but I am the product of a woman who like a few beers a week, Even when breast feeding me - yes, I was the only one she did that for because we were traveling a lot when I was a kid and it was easier than bottles. Anyway I was almost 10 pounds at birth so no low birth weight there - now she took up smoking after I was born and each child was progressively smaller. So I believe no smoking is a good rule. I grew up with a great tolerance for alcohol, but no desire to drink it, just did it socially for a few years, yet not imbibing, not a problem. I do like a cold beer maybe a few times a year in the summer.

I am not sure that a rare drink is as harmful as more regular imbibing. But any smoking definitely is a problem.

[Javaman]

4. here's some irony...

my mom didn't smoke when pregnant with my brother or my sisters (this was the 1950's and early '60's) and they all smoked as adults.

she smoked when having me, and I have had zero desire my entire life to smoke and find the odor of cigarette smoke revolting.

Just irony, not using this as causation.

[Cleita]

2. One of my girlfriends did and she was ordinarily a non-drinker.

But she drank all through her pregnancy, not a lot, about one shot a day, but every day. Once she had the baby she stopped. The baby was healthy. I asked her why and all she could say was that she craved it while pregnant but didn't when not.

[Warpy]

3. I find this zero tolerance thing ridiculous

Our ancestors couldn't drink the water and got their fluids from soups, stews, porridges, and alcoholic beverages like wine, mead, ale and beer. Alcohol killed the bugs that would have killed them.

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is horrible but no level has ever been established above which it is unsafe to drink, probably because the hysteria surrounding it has prevented real science from being done.

This article has an interesting statistic, that only 5% of alcoholic women who drank heavily during pregnancy produced infants with FAS. http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/02/23/fetal-alcohol-syndrome-and-the-social-control-of-mothers/

This site details a study which found a level below which no mothers delivered FAS babies/ http://www2.potsdam.edu/alcohol/FetalAlcoholSyndrome.html

The whole thing has been done to death. Most of my friends knew they couldn't handle the guilt if their babies had been born with preventable defects and abstained. Other mothers didn't. The point is that no one has been appointed any woman's nanny and no one else need voice an opinion if she stops for a glass of wine after work.