From just one peer-reviewed source:
Current Pharmaceutical Design, 2006, Vol. 12, No. 12 Ernest L. Abel
Since it was not alcohol per se but its abuse that Jones and Smith associated with the pattern of anomalies they identified, a more appropriate term for the disorder is ?fetal alcohol abuse syndrome? [5]. By simply labeling it ?fetal alcohol syndrome? Jones and Smith succeeded in bringing
this birth defect to international attention, but it also resulted
in widespread error and apprehension that any amount of alcohol consumption during pregnancy posed a comparable danger to alcohol abuse.
This error is not confined to the general public. In the United States, a third of the more than 350 obstetricians and
general practitioners in Michigan believe that the syndrome can result from consumption of as little as one drink a day
[6] although the syndrome has never been found in the absence of maternal alcoholism. One of the reasons for this error is, what German pediatrician Dr. Hans Spohr, who has
been studying the syndrome for many decades, calls ?diagnosis by association.? ?They (most physicians) see a ?funnylooking?
child, they have heard about FAS, and if somebody says the mother is drinking, they make the diagnosis? [7, p. 153].
The fact that large numbers of clinicians and researchers now believe that even minimal amounts of alcohol consumption
during pregnancy can produce the syndrome has
created a moral panic about drinking during pregnancy [8] that has exaggerated its dangers, inflated the number of children
allegedly affected, and has possibly resulted in the inappropriate
treatment of thousands of children. The fact is that the United States, which has one of the lowest rates of alcohol consumption in the western world, has the highest
rate of fetal alcohol syndrome [9].
Even more contentious is the belief that minimal amounts of alcohol can cause some of the individual anomalies that comprise the syndrome. These effects have been ariouslycalled ?fetal alcohol effects? (FAE), ?alcohol-related birth defects?(ARBD), prenatal alcohol effects (PAE), ?prenatal exposure to alcohol? (PEA), alcohol-related neurodevelopmental
disorder (ARND), and most recently, ?fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, (FASD), a burgeoning lexicon suggesting
more than disagreement about the nature of the disorder attempting
to be categorized. Despite this uncertainty, the subcategory
has often been interpreted as referring to an attenuated
severity of FAS [10]. However, the damage is the same
whether it occurs as a singular anomaly or as a component of
a pattern of anomalies. The likely explanation is that one or
more anomalies resulting from maternal alcohol abuse result
from exposure on specific days of fetal development whereas
the full blown syndrome results from exposure throughout
pregnancy. In other words, the amount of drinking associated
with the proximate cause - - alcohol abuse - - is the same;
what differs is the pattern of exposure. The fact that it is not
an occasional drink or two, but a considerable amount of
drinking during pregnancy, especially when consistent,
which produces prenatal damage, is more than evident from
the clinical case literature.