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.

Heroin also a drug you use that whilst you were pregnant?? Feeling guilty??

No, I prefer cocaine myself.

Two glasses a week of wine also has no known contraindications for a foetus.
Do you know that alchohol is a natural by-product of digestion? In order to completely protect a foetus from alcohol you'd have to avoid digestion....which might not be best thing to do...

i can definitely taste something akin to alcohol in my vomit, mrsd, even now, after one too many Kettle crisps or Magnum bars.

oh my goodness where do you all get your information from? Must stop reading this thread!

Digestion also releases ammonia into your bloodstream. Wouldn't feed that to a baby either!

I feel the need to wade in, as a pregnant woman who does consume a glass of wine once (sometimes even twice) a week.

Tootidy, you know that you should never have posted the question if you didn't want to be made to feel guilty about your own actions.

But honestly, some people need to get over themselves. Parenting (and indeed life itself) involves making personal decisions on risk based, more often than not, on some degree of selfishness.

We have become so obsessed with professional parenting that we are constantly being told that it is our duty to do nothing at all that could have the slightest impact whatsoever on our child. No coffee, no alcohol, no cigarettes, no soft drinks, no sugar (might cause obesity in later life), not too much fat, no seafood, no peanuts, no cheese and on top of all this we are told not to be so bloody stressed! It's a wonder we're haven;t all got pnd by the end of it!

As a mother we face a lifetime of these decisions, should we breastfeed, should we go back to work, should we let them eat sweets, should we let them cross the road, should they leave the house, should we move to the higlands because of the pollution, should we grow our own organic pigs.

and there will always be someone who tells us that we should be sacrificing just that little bit more of ourselves for our children.

Maybe a small amount of alcohol could have been a factor in certain circumstances, but it probably wasn't. A good friend of mine has just miscarried, should I berate her for that cafe latte because the Today programme told me it might have an impact, or should I just show some support .

I'll shut up now.

And nobody's suggesting getting wrecked or binge drinking. Just a small (125 - 150ml) glass of wine, twice a week. And there is no evidence anywhere that this causes any harm.

your decision

I don't but tbh I can't be arsed to worry about it

prob will once I get to the 3rd trimester and can't do much else

Personally, I kept off the alcohol totally for the first trimester, had maybe 1 glass of something occasionally from there on. I did relax a bit during the last month and once had a couple of glasses of wine not long before my due date... I think I needed it by then!

This was my own personal decision, but it definitely didn't help that the guidelines changed halfway through my pregnancy - load of help that was!

...and I would just like to add that there is a lot of judgement is you drink during pregnancy, but very little about drinking when breastfeeding. When you're pregnant the liver actually filters out most of the alcohol and only a teeny percentage will actually make it to the foetus. When BFing it's about the same concentration as your blood alcohol (please, someone correct me if I'm wrong here?)

I haven't read the whole thread because I find all this righteous indignation (which I'm sure is on here or it wouldn't have got to so many posts) utterly tedious.

Just wanted to answer you kekouan. You're right about the amount of alcohol that gets to your baby if you're breastfeeding - it's the same as in your blood. But that's 2% of what you consumed so hardly a skinful. Do many women get totally hammered and then go home and breastfeed? I can't think that anyone who's been completely abstemious during pregnancy goes wild when bfing. Odd glass of wine - sure. And nothing to say that's wrong. As kellymom says, if you're sober enough to drive, you're sober enough to breastfeed.

Tittybangbang is right - we (as a society, and on MN) have a very odd and inconsistent attitude to risk.

It's very clear that heavy drinking is damaging - no-one would ever dispute that. There's no evidence that an occasional small taste of alcohol is damaging, and given what we know about how our bodies process alcohol, we'd have to rewrite the physiology books if that were the case.

On the other hand, there's good, solid evidence that anything other than exclusive breastfeeding increases a baby's chance of, for example, being hospitalised with infection.

Yet hardly anyone exclusively breastfeeds, and when people choose to mix feed or wean early it's often on the basis of "happy mum, happy baby", and this is seen as a perfectly good reason to take an option which is knwon to be more risky to a baby's health.

You can't have it both ways: Either you go for an evidence-based approach or you don't.

If you want to follow the hard evidence, you'd not stress about having a little taste of wine from time to time, but would exclusively breastfeed to approx 6 months if at all feasible.

Abstaining totally from alcohol is a perfectly good way of minimising any FAS/FASD risk, but abstainers can't claim that it's safer than drinking tiny amounts of alcohol because the facts don't support this.

very good post welliemum
happy mum = happy baby is trotted out for any number of things...apart from this one it would seem!

Nicely said welliemum!

Life is risky. I can stay home all the time and risk depression and builders' rubble landing on my head, or go down the street and risk being run over, the bus crashing, and inhaling vehicle exhaust.
I can either eat foods I can tolerate and risk effects of too much fat and not enough of various vitamins, or risk the effects of throwing up and becoming more exhausted from that.
I can decide to ignore various claims I read on the internet and risk that they might be right, or risk the effects of being stressed and worried.

Given that the experts keep saying 'listen to your body', rather than 'do not drink', I'll have a wee nightcap and then go for more sleep. Actually, can't be bothered to go downstairs, so just the good night's sleep...

Not trying to be at all righteous, like I said above, it's a personal decision and yours to make. As stated, I was just playing devils advocate. To throw another spanner in the works, if it is perfectly acceptable to have a couple of glasses of wine a week, is it then ok to have a few cigarettes per week? Whether anybody wants to admit it or not, alcohol is a drug, and it does do damage. As do cigarettes. Fact.

These guidelines are not put in place to annoy/restrict you and make you feel like you need to be super mum. They are there as information that you can choose to follow or not. They are there to try and help protect yours and your childs health. Not to condemn you. People may judge you for your decisions as they have the right to do, but they only do it because they believe it would be safer for you and you unborn baby if you didn't drink/smoke/eat certain foods/take drugs/do too much excercise etc. I think many of you get too caught up in these arguments and think people are out to get you, they aren't. They are just trying to let you know all of the facts and want you and your baby to be safe. It is then up to you to take the risk. Like it or not, it is much safer to not drink at all then it is to have the odd one every week.

And I'm sorry to say that the argument of happy mum = happy baby in this case is laughable! Seriously lol? If the only thing to make you happy is alcohol, there is clearly more of an issue imho.

I always wonder how many people manage to abstain when TTC (or, on the flip side, how many pgs are down to the complete opposite!).

I read everything, assessed the risks - and to return to OP, I had half a glass of wine once a fortnight or so, each time with food. And I loved it. Healthy bouncing baby born 11 months ago and I was complemented on the quality of my placenta by the midwife (not a conversation I'd ever expected to have.....). I appreciate that may be seen as early days to some but she's a bright and happy little soul.

At the same time, I was working 12-hour days in a stressful City job and commuting 2 hours per day. If I should have abstained from anything, it should probably have been that!

Oh, and the advice on how much to drink/not to drink changed 3 times whilst I was pregnant. Which, to my mind, means they basically don't know.

Whatever you decide to do, you'll still end up feeling guilty about it - it seems to go with the whole territory!!

....I should add though, I didn't have anything for the first twelve weeks!

Blimey, maybloom, I don't think anyone here is claiming that the only way they can be happy is by drinking alcohol! That would indeed be a worry.

As it happens, I strongly disagree with the whole "happy baby=happy mummy" argument, but I know a lot of people on here subscribe to it. My point is that it stands or falls in its entirety - people can't cherry pick which issues it's OK for.

I think cigarette smoking is not a good comparison here because there's demonstrable proof of harm even from the relatively small amounts of toxins absorbed by passive smokers. Also, the direct effects of nicotine on placental blood vessels etc are well documented. ie, it's more than likely that there's no safe level in pregnancy - or at any rate no really practical safe level. (0.8% of a cigarette, anyone?)

So if you're an "evidence-based parent" - making decisions on the basis of evidence of harm - you would breastfeed, you would abstain from smoking and from heavy drinking, but you would not necessarily be teetotal.

I think sophable and others have made this point very well already, but guidelines are only as good as the evidence behind them. The advice to abstain totally from alcohol in pregnancy is not supported by evidence. It's weak, patronising guidelines like this that give guidelines a bad name.

We're grown-ups and can deal with the truth. If the truth is something like "There probably is a safe level of alcohol consumption but we have no idea what it is" then that's what the guidelines should say. Where there's no clear evidence on a issue, it's up to us as parents to make our own assessment of what is safe.

Inevitably, people will have different views on where to draw the line, but that's as it should be - we all manage risk and uncertainty in different ways.

In other words, people who abstain totally and people who drink just a little are both right in the light of current knowledge, and shouldn't really be arguing with each other!

so, i've just come from having a lovely pint of guinness at the pub with my DH. it was so satisfying even though it took me forever to drink it... oh and i am 22 weeks.

the msg thing. last week on the national, (canadian news) there was a report of a highschool student on a science summer camp that has done the preliminaries for a study of the affect of msg on brain cells using snails. her initial study showed the rapid deconstruction that msg does to brain cells and that it significantly slows development of new ones. crazy.

In real life, I have been fascinated by someone saying that that breastfeeding is only okay if done for the "right reasons" with insinuations that if a mother enjoys it, it is not for the right reasons. I found that beyond bizarre, but was unable to draw more information from the young mother who said it, or the friends who seemed to be nodding in agreement with her.

I wonder if the extreme dissaproval of women who enjoy a small amount of alcohol in pregnancy is down to that reasoning too. Pregnant and nursing mothers should be selfless, saintly beings whose only thought is for their babies.

Maybe that is why the righteous objectors can't explain why they find a pregnant woman enjoying a glass of beer or wine so utterly repugnant. There is certainly no evidence it will do any harm. Unfortunately, the new guidelines of no alcohol persuade these people that they have good grounds for adding to the stress and anxiety of pregnant women and nursing mothers.

Well - I am pg, and I have the very occasional, very small bito alcohol. Like a third of a glass of beer then filled up with lemonade. The only reason they say don't drink at all is because they don't believe that people can act responsibly enough not to binge drink while pregnant. The only reason I drank almost no alcohol is because first I was horribly sick, and since then I've had the worst heartburn, so drinking wine is like a form of torture.

Regarding cigarettes, i was surprised to find out that they only count it a risk if you're smoking more than five a day! When I had my booking in appointment, I had managed to get down to 1 or 2 a day already in my bid to quit, and the midwife told me this interesting little bit. Having said that, I still quit smoking anyway.

Oh,- a bit of advice I was given to help prevent anaemia is to drink a pint of Irish stout each week, as it is high in iron. Apparently it's a good way to avoid taking constipation inducing iron tablets. I didn't do this though, but mainly because I don't like stout!