To want a couple of glasses of wine when pregnant??

[tootidy]

I am nearly 10 weeks pregnant and would like to drink a couple of glasses of wine (per week) as I did when i was pregnant with my other children. The current guidelines are not to drink at all which is different to what it used to be.

My aunt who is a Dr in Switzerland had a glass of wine every day throughout her three pregnancies ( it is common there to have wine with the evnign meal)and the was actually considered beneficial!!!

I had a few glasses of wine throughout both of my pregnancies and tbh found it very relaxing and ended up feel less achy and stressed.

I agree with sophable. i think there has been all this publicity about binge drinking that instead of saying drink in moderation they decided on a complete ban because we're too thick to understand moderate.

KVC. you KNOW these children? you have seen a formal diagnosis of them? you have proof of how much alcohol was consumed?

out of interest, do you have a personal angle on this?

and btw i didn't drink when pregnant other than a glass or two of wine just before labour as i didn't feel like it. one of my first pregnancy symptoms was going off alcohol completely.

so that's my personal experience.

"KVC. you KNOW these children? you have seen a formal diagnosis of them? you have proof of how much alcohol was consumed?"

I was thinking this too. i don't know any kids who have been diagnosed with this.

"I have just seen so many kids suffer from FASD"

How,do you work with children with special needs, just don't get it?

When a friend of mine was in hospital having her first baby, a girl in the bed opposite her had a ll her friends round to visit and was laughing with her frineds that her baby had the shakes, saying 'it was probably all that vodka I drank he he'.

Later that day when she found out it was in fact 'all that vodka she drank', she wasn't so jokey.

A bit digressional from the OP, but a story that always comes into my head when reading this kind of thing

KVC I understand your stance on this issue if you are genuinely seeing children with FAS BUT I think you are being a bit unreasonable to come on here and scaremonger pregnant women who genuinely feel having a glass of wine during pregnancy is okay. It is extremely doubtful that drinking a couple of glasses of wine is going to do any harm. Surely breathing in fumes from vehicles/eating junk food/drinking diet drinks/using cleaning fluids all effect the foetus in some way just as much?

I am sure you are telling the truth BUT how do you know what these mothers drank during pregnancy. Surely for the children to be in foster care these mothers had serious drink problems?

KVC - what are these magic special treatments that children with delays/behavioural difficulties could access if their parents sought a FAS label?

What's "a few glasses" of wine a week, KVC? I only ask because to some people "a few" = 2 or 3, and to some people, "a few"=40+ (as in, everyone will be obese in a few years said the Newspapers recently, ie, by the year 2050).. So when people say only "a few" we need to be clear what you mean.

if the contact you have with all these children with FAS/FASD is through social services or kids in foster care, it's hardly likely you're talking about mothers who drank a couple of glasses of wine here and there in pregnancy.

and as a person whose child's severe, diagnosed dyspraxia is more than likely inherited from her father's side of the family, assuming that a large number of children with learning disabilities like ADHD and dyslexia are really the child of mothers who drank is ignorant at best.

But KVC do you know HOW much alcohol these mothers drank? I understand the part with regards to what one person can consume is too much for another but (and I am sure you can see where I am coming from) do you truly believe these mothers have only had a couple/few units a week? My father was a headteacher at a Special Needs School for 30 years, he too dealt with FAS (although quite rarely) and each mother had been an alcoholic.

Also, how do you how much the mothers of the affected children really drank? Surely they were likely to be in denial or lied if asked, or don't really remember.

It is absolutely fine to drink up to 8 units a week while pregnant. A unit being a 125ml glass of wine.

Take a measuring jug at home and pour 125ml of water into a wine glass (even mark a line)and stick to that size.

The OP was asking about a couple of glasses of wine a week. Not tanning a bottle of vodka.

Can I just chip in that in our mum's day they were advised to drink stout every day. In Victorian times with Gin palaces everyone was pissed the whole time (I remember a statistic that in the 1850's in London, 1 in 3 people were so drunk they couldn't stand up. How they worked that out I have no idea).

My point is that yes, we know foetal alcohol syndrome exists, it has very recognisable effects on the childs features etc and has been linked with extremely heavy consumption during pregnancy. The spectrum side of it is newer and as far as I know no-one really knows how much is too much etc.

But we didn't die out as a result of everyone drinking throughout pregnancy during the seventies etc. Surely if there were a strong link these type of behaviours/problems would be much more marked in our generation that the generation which followed i.e. our children. As I'm sure we are drinking less during pregnancy than our parents did on the whole.

Thanks for replying KVC. I misunderstood your point - I thought you meant that getting a DX of FAS rather than say ADHD would mean different therapies.

KVC you still haven't answered my question with regards to how much alcohol these mothers drank during pregnancy.

I'm an American immigrant to the UK and now a dual national. To be quite frank, I take every one of their 'guidlines' with a massive grain of salt because I know how a lot of their 'research' is funded and I know what an extremely litigous society they are - I worked as a legal secretary for 11 years.

I don't see what is to be gained about a mother admitting she drank during pregnancy if her child has a diagnosis of ADHD or dyslexia.

I mean, there is NO hard evidence to say those conditions are FAS or FASD or caused by moderate drinking in a mother.

You don't know what caused it, yet from your posts you're assuming it's because the mothers don't admit they drank in pregnancy, when all the real evidence we have points to alcoholism and heavy alcohol consumption being causitive of FAS/FASD, not a couple of glasses of wine or beer here and there.

Sorry, I just don't buy it.

THIS country went to no alcohol at all for no real other reason than it's thought that British women don't know how to drink in moderation and therefore need policed as such. As a British woman, I find that bollocks, too.

The Government even admitted when the new guidelines came out that there was no evidence to suggest that a couple units a week was unsafe, and that they were only saying that as they thought it might help prod the real binge-drinkers into drinking less.

All the medical staff I've seen during pregnancy have been more concerned about stressed mothers, and I had both a midwife and a GP recommend one small glass of wine with dinner when I went on holiday to France, telling me that a relaxing holiday was probably way more important than anything else I could do.

This is what I'd already decided to do, but it was nice to be reassured. I have a doctorate in embryonic neurobiology so possibly have more idea about risks than many people - my personal decision was to be paranoid for the first 3 months and then relax. As it happened I didn't know I was pregnant until after the first trimester, so I'll just have to hope that a few glasses a week hasn't caused problems.