Anyone else today's 'Observer' headlines about alcohol in pregnancy?

[atalantis]

I'm 14 weeks, and for the last 4 weeks or so I've been allowing myself one glass of lovely red wine on a Saturday night. I look forward to it every week; should I really have to stop? I'd be interested to hear your opinions...

But how do you assess that without looking at the medical evidence and deciding where/how/if it's flawed? I'm skeptical about studies of all kinds, and I'm a feminist so quite sensitive to issues of controlling women, but what I'm interested in here is whether "it's a conspiracy to control women's behaviour" is the premise or the conclusion here.

Also I'm curious as to who the people are who are only giving up alcohol because society tells them to and how you tell when someone's doing that...

Academia isn't science - just a note

science, tests, studies are done inside of academia, monkeytrousers.

Oh I know loads of women who gave up drinking completely at least in public when they were pregnant, purely and simply because they felt that ordering a glass of wine/ beer would expose them to adverse comment from other people. Nothing to do with their own decision or listening to their own bodies, or making their own risk assessments, purely and simply a stepping into line exercise.

I think the subtle (or not so subtle) pressure is definitely already there.

Never put me off Caligula!

Guinness used to be prescribed to pregnant women by their doctors for the iron. Look how they all turned out!

(I can say that having Irish relatives!)

Caligula - hmm, yes, you're quite right, lots of people may turn down a drink in public who think it would be OK really. Doesn't that imply they've actually disbelieved the newspaper stories, though? Because if they'd taken them at face value, they'd think alcohol was dangerous, and therefore not want to drink (rather than wanting to drink but deciding not to, to avoid criticism). As it is, they want to drink, so presumably they think the stuff in the papers about it being possibly dangerous to do so is so much rubbish. Those people turning down drinks in public are certainly reacting to perceived social pressure, itself based on a perception of what general public opinion of drinking in pregnancy is that's based on things like newspaper stories, but their behaviour seems to include an implicit rejection of those very stories.

In any case, those people clearly aren't the same people as those who'd declare in a thread like this that they don't think drinking in pregnancy is safe (those being presumably people who either did believe the newspaper stories or otherwise - by their own reading or whatever - ended up not wanting to drink). I'd say the behaviour of both groups is pretty reasonable really. After all someone could be quite right in assessing public opinion of drinking in pregnancy as such that they'll get dirty looks, and make a rational decision only to drink in private even though they don't think it's a risk. It might not be very 'stand up and be counted' behaviour, but it doesn't seem irrational. Equally, someone else could read up a bit on alcohol in pregnancy and come to a quite rational decision that they want to avoid it. Lots of rationality all round!

Yes I know, but the proof of something in say, the humanities is all about 'texts' not evidence. That's all I mean. The scientific method which medicine employs has definites and has no truck with all this 'relative' nonsense is all I'm saying

i see monkeytrousers. but academia is not only based on texts, its also based on scientific method, perhaps that where you got confused thinking academia is not science. for example, medical data comes from the studies done by doctors, and those studies are done inside of an academic environment with scientific method.

and they can be totally bullshit, manipulated! and can come out just as the client would like to, whether its the government, or a company requiring certain tests to show certain things.

Yes mlh but my objection is to women feeling and being bullied for no good reason.

I'm not criticising anyone who makes the very sensible judgement that she doesn't want to excite adverse (and/ or possibly abusive) comment, so therefore she won't drink in public - I certainly wouldn't expect any pregnant woman to "stand up and be counted". What I'm saying is, she shouldn't jolly well need to be. And she shouldn't be bullied into not having a glass of wine if she fanices it.

The fact that the climate is moving towards women feeling they have to toe this irrational line, is very disturbing imo.

I love mumsnet, it's like an opera - you can have several different conversations going at the same time in the same thread.

Agree about the operatic quality of threads...

But I'm not sure about the being bullied. For the sake of argument (why else are we here? ): couldn't it just be that scientific evidence has moved drinking into a fenced off area of "things we perceive as being bad for pregnant women" that has always been there? Smoking wasn't in that area; it now is. Exercise probably used to be in that area a lot more than it is now.

Also, just to pick another example, I think there's a pretty strong case for the people with the cautious views feeling bullied into keeping quiet in some contexts. Saying "er no well actually I wouldn't do that" in a whole load of contexts is quite a difficult thing to do - there's a massive social pressure amongst women to tell each other what we know the other person wants to hear, and to agree that such and such a thing (doing something, not doing it, whatever) is fine. So social pressure works in all directions and no one is more right and wrong than any other just because they are the one experiencing the social discomfort.

I don't know - I think we're all adults, at the end of the day, and our different views have to stand or fall on their own (scientific or other) merits. I'm guessing that you wouldn't say "she shouldn't be bullied into not having a cigarette if she fanices it", because the difference there is that the final verdict is generally considered to be in for smoking, whereas people are not at all as convinced about drinking. In which case the thing we should surely all be discussing is the scientific case or not for abstinence. Arguments about public opinion on drinking in pregnancy amounting to bullying really depend on the idea that that odd glass of wine is harmless as a premise, and yet that's not at all agreed on.

Well I wouldn't like a woman to be bullied into not smoking either tbh. I'd like her not to smoke because she'd chosen not to for her own health and the good of her baby, not because she was afraid of being judged or worse abused, for her behaviour.

i think im leading the thread astray, i will stop.

Well I agree, obviously, no one should actually be bullied overtly, physically or verbally or whatever, but with people turning down drinks because they're afraid of being seen as pariahs that's not really quite bullying is it? If someone pregnant doesn't light up a cigarette next to me because she's afraid I'll disapprove, then I'm not bullying her - I'm not doing anything! Of course in an ideal world the reason that woman wouldn't light up would be for her own reasons first, but that doesn't mean the social attitudes are wrong or represent bullying.

How do you actually avoid people feeling social pressure? Related to that, how do you actually avoid people from having negative opinions of a behaviour (and therefore creating a social pressure to avoid it)? You can't. What seems to happen is that those people who think the behaviour is fine call someone reacting to the social pressure 'being bullied', and others wouldn't. When we all agree that a behaviour isn't OK, we don't describe someone avoiding that behaviour despite wanting to do it as them being bullied. We only use those words when we think the behaviour is actually OK and the people who think it's not are irrational. But I think that's then missing the real issue for debate, which is whether or not the behaviour is OK or not OK for health.

BTW it's mlh again! Changed my name for something else because I hate the pressure of a single identity across wildly different topics - mumsnet is so liberating in that respect!

Well I'd say it's bullying when there is nothing wrong with the behaviour and the woman knows there's nothing wrong with it but she's afraid to do it anyway.

It's quite different when you know you shouldn't do it, isn't it? Like drunk driving or something.

Also disagree about the thread beign about whether the behaviour OK or not OK for health. It's a matter of opinion, always will be imo, because the research will never be conclusive - too many factors. And there will also always be women who will drink in pregnancy as long as drinking alcohol is the societal norm, because they won't know they're pregnant in the first few weeks. This thread is about the social and political implications of guidelines which have no medical basis.

I think the thread I started today about a bottle of wine a night being excessive highlighted that people have odd attitudes to alcohol. All of you, in fact. Not me though. I am great.

[titter]

Exactly, you say it's bullying "when there's nothing wrong with the behaviour", which is precisely what not everyone agrees on. The idea that the guidelines have no medical basis is also something you can't just state as fact - that's a contested issue in itself, based on how good people think various bits of research are, and how much they think it matters.

And so what if people will always drink before they know they're pg (I did too!) - what difference does that make to anything?

It seems to me everything you've posted depends on the premise (not conclusion argued from anywhere else, but premise) that there's no good scientific reason not to drink. Why not allow the rationality of other views that don't take that as a premise?

Missed that one, link?

(Will read tomorrow, must go sleep now)

The reason it makes such a difference is that those first few weeks are the time when the foetus is most vulnerable to any damage from alcohol.

So the idea that having a glass of wine when you're 18 weeks pregnant say, or 26 weeks, or 32 weeks, is going to do more harm than all those binges you might have had at 3 weeks, at five weeks and at six weeks, is just absurd imo.

Which is why getting all judgemental about it at that stage, si mad. (The Christian fundamentalists who say no woman of childbearing age should ever drink in case she gets pregant at least have logic on their side on this one. You've got to give them that, I suppose.)

Well it would make a difference if you hadn't drunk then, but leaving that aside - who's actually advocating "getting all judgemental"?

I mean as I see it, you've got guidelines to pass on to women, of some kind of other, and depending on what they are, society at large is going to end up with some opinion or other of the behaviour in question. You can't escape that link from guidelines about safety or whatever, to society having some opinion or other about what people who go against those guidelines are doing. The guidelines have to be justified on scientific grounds and in a sort of global cost-benefit way, and then individuals debate what to do in an individual cost-benefit way. Either you think the guidelines are OK or they're not, but I'm not sure where judgemental comes in.

Though I suppose judgemental comes in everywhere people disagree about whether a behaviour is necessary or not, good or bad or not, but doesn't that mean it sort of comes out of every side of the equation? Anyone can accuse someone else of being judgmental in a parenting debate because it's just the posh way of saying "you disagree with what I'm doing, how dare you!" - when you get down to it, it doesn't mean more than disagreement though, does it? Or maybe "judgementalism" is detected when you get disagreement + bad manners, in which case the bad manners should be the reason for criticism, not the opinion that the people are disagreeing about.

Hmm, talk about spiralling insanely away from the original topic...

For Caligula, bottle of wine a night thread

Caligula - I am certainly not a fundamentalist Christian but that was kind of my argument earlier. If you take the view that any alcohol at all is forbidden during pregnancy because it might harm the foetus then the logical conclusion is that any woman of childbearing age who is having any sort of unprotected sex ever should not drink.

The ban on alcohol I mentioned when trying to conceive was not based on it making conception easier (though it might) but based on the fact that the most vulnerable time for a foetus is in the very early weeks so if you get pregannt and aren't sure of the exact conception date (which is the case for most women I'd say) you could theoretically do as much damage by unknowingly drinking in those weeks than any drinking done later - We just don't actually know the real risks.

If you take this argument even further, women in this group (childbearing age who ever have unprotected sex) should not take any substance (including many useful medications) that might harm the baby - just in case they get pregnant.

This is a ridiculous way to proceed as most people (fundamentalist Christians aside) would concede.

The fact then is that we all take a risk sometimes by drinking but.

Once we know we are pregnant, and for many woemn that is well into the stage when harmful substances can do damage many women then choose to limit this possible risk. the fact is that anyone who has been drinking in the very early weeks of pregancy have still taken a risk but it is not so visible as a 32 week pregnant woman who has 1 glass of wine (maybe her only one that month) in public so it is not subject to public scrutiny in the same way.

I thought in the first couple of weeks (when you are most likely to not realise you are pregnant and therefore drink) the yolk sac provided most of the nutrition to the embryo until the placenta had grown sufficiently. Am I wrong??

Let's all go the way of the US!

Yeah!

Where the barrista at Starbucks' refuses to serve obviously pregnant women caffeinated drinks and waiters in restaurant regularly tell pregnant women what they're ordering isn't 'healthy' for pregnant women and refuse to serve them the meal of their choice.

Where you can face criminal charges for behaving in a way that is considered potentially damaging to your foetus.

Where you can't get birth control w/o parental consent if you're under 18.

What a place to live, eh! Where you, a grown women, are reduced to nothing but a vessel for your foetus and treated accordingly.