drinking advice during pregnancy...

[AliGrylls]

This is the first time I have started a thread in feminism but I have found something I feel really strongly about and I am sure if it is not a feminist issue it should be.

The drinking advice during pregnancy is currently not to drink at all. The reason for this is because when an audit was done in 2007 it was discovered that women were confused by the advice (until then it was accepted that a woman could drink 7 units of alcohol per week no more than 2 in one go).

The only good thing about this advice atm is that drinking whilst pregnant is not actually against the law in the UK. The other night DH and I were watching a documentary about the effects of drinking whilst pregnant and it was saying that in some states in the US not only is it against the law for pregnant women to drink but women are encouraged to not drink if they are in a "pre-pregnant state", ie, fertile but not pregnant.

I worry because I fear the current advice treats women like morons and surely a woman should have access to all information so that she can make an informed decision (people who are going to drink a lot will probably do it behind closed doors anyway).

Also, what starts in the US does usually ends up being over here and I can't help thinking the US way is a blatant infringement of the rights of the mother.

Am I right? What do other people think about this issue?

I agree with you.

It is a policy that treats women like idiots. There has been another study recently that found that drinking in moderation during pregnancy does not pose risks.

I do not think it is actually against the law for women to drink while pg in the US, it may be against the law to serve a pg woman alcohol in some states. Certainly there are tales of pg women being refused coffee, so if they are being refused alcohol I'm not surprised. Am happy to be corrected on the illegality thing. I am aware that there are some women in prison in the US for pretty dodgy pregnancy/birth related reasons, so anything is possible.

"Utah is not the first state to punish pregnant women. In 2006, medical personnel assisting a 15-year-old African American girl in Mississippi suffering a stillbirth called the police. She was charged as an adult for murder.

A severely depressed woman in South Carolina just last year lost her fetus during a suicide attempt. After months in jail without bail, she pleaded guilty to manslaughter to avoid a murder conviction." from here

I do not believe that we will end up the same as the US on any of this, as our approach to contraception, abortion, religion, pregnancy and childbirth are completely different. We may speak the same language but we are not a similar culture by a long chalk.

I was hoping someone would bring this up because it is outrageous. It totally treats women as blithering idiots.

Good god I hope they don't even consider making it illegal here. There is literally NO evidence that drinking small amounts is dangerous, they're really verging on way cautious by saying "well, we don't know for sure that it doesn't harm the baby - so don't do it at all".
Same goes for us without child right? We don't KNOW that drinking won't damage us at all so we shouldn't do it, same with smoking, driving, high fat foods etc x a million.

"I do not believe that we will end up the same as the US on any of this, as our approach to contraception, abortion, religion, pregnancy and childbirth are completely different. We may speak the same language but we are not a similar culture by a long chalk."
I hope not but NICE have already made murmurings about bringing in breathaliser tests during pregnancy. It is all about trying to take control of pregnancies and foetuses (sp?) and taking that control away from mothers as obviously we are not responsible enough .
I had this argument with a friend of mine's DH. He argued that these tests should be brought in because the pregnant woman is responsible for another human being (no shit!). My argument: well if that was the case why not breathalise everyone as get into the car in the morning in case we are drunk and kill someone on the roads. We are no less responsible for other lives if we drive than if we are pregnant.

I also thought in this country that the unborn child doesn't have any rights (by law) until it is born? So in that case the rights of the mother do take precedent over the foetus.

NICE weren't talking about breathaliser tests for alcohol! You have got mixed up - they were trialling carbon monoxide testers ie for smoking - I'm sure that's right.

If someone has been boozing you can normally smell if off them, apart from anything else.

Agree with the rest of your post though!

FWIW the carbon monoxide testing was talked about on here at the time (normal chat/news, not feminist section) and everyone thought it was outrageous.

You're right! Oops . I think I am getting confused with Holland (I was in Holland when having the discussion with friend's DH).
Hopefully the principle I was trying to convey is still the same!

agree absolutely Ali. I have always said it is a feminist issue.

One point I have made before when this has been discussed on here is that if society is concerned about the health of our unborn children, there are lots of other things they could do to protect the babies, some of which have more evidence behind them. For example: funding maternity services so that no-one is sent away from hospital in labour because there are no beds and you can always count on there being one midwife per woman, better legal protection for pregnant women at work so we don't have hugely stressful pregnancies due to shit from our bosses.... But do they choose to do that? Nope, they just tell us to drink less.

Absolutely it's a feminist issue.

IMO most of the advice we're given about pregnancy, is about policing our behaviour, not about health at all.

Thing is, restricting units during pregnancy, saying none, banning it, none of this is going to stop alcoholics drinking. And people who drink heavily in pregnancy, have a drink problem, whether they want to admit it to themselves or not.

The information scares the pants off people who like the occasional snifter, and does sod all to counteract the real problem.

And therein lies the problem, I am sure of it.

Remember reading in Backlash about the multiple restrictions put on women because they might just be carrying babies.

That case of the factory where loads of women got themselves sterilised because they couldn't afford to give up their jobs on the "dangerous to potential foetuses" part of the factory. That's where this kind of thing leads.

What I don't understand is that it has been shown that exposure to various substances harms sperm quality, with proven and theorised effects on the foetus. Also, older men are more likely to produce pregnancies which end in miscarriage and the children who are born are more at risk of various problems.

Where are the campaigns aimed at men / the laws restricting what men can do when they are trying to conceive / during their fertile years?

Evilants that article is a case in point -the women had to be sterilised but nothing for the men, even though working in the conditions had side effects for their reproductive health as well

excellent point re sperm ISNT!

You are so right about no-one talking about the problems of unhealthy sperm, and the connection to wealthier older men.

Imagine trying to get your investors (still mainly older men) to fund a project that examines whether their second or third families with new young wife might be at risk because they're a load of balding old dears.

And it would also put a hole in the "it's what's natural, men seek youth and beauty and women look for experience and "security"" bundle of arse.

If there were more rich older women (instead of positively loads and loads of older women living in poverty), maybe it would become "the natural order" for young men who don't want to have children, to seek older "secure" partners who are past their child-bearing years?

yes, I'm imagining not investors but grant awarding bodies, research councils etc who coincidentally are ALSO composed mainly of middle aged or elderly men some of whom are shagging their students.
funny that.

Sorry, I was kind of meaning those people under the umbrella of investors. People who might deign to give you some money to do some work, kind of thing :)

Cor blimey it wasn't that bad at my uni AFAIK Stewie. Or rather, it was but they stuck to their PhD students, not the undergrads...ok that's not much better is it.

I knew someone at Oxford who married his student (he was an Anglo Saxon specialist, probably a prof by now) but he was so unworldly one always suspected he didn't realise you weren't meant to.
DH's PhD supervisor had an affair with another PhD student which led to his marriage breaking up, but DH never realised and thought it was purely due to workaholism - I randomly found out due to chatting to someone on a train who turned out to know them.

I'd hazard a guess there was more going on than you knew about EvilAnts! They tend to keep it pretty quiet - after all they have to.

I'm sure there was! Just couldn't think of much snogging-in-the-bar type activity. What college did you go to SSM? Have i asked you before?

My tutor had a succession of PhD students one after another. In the biblical sense that is. And one of my friends had a supervisor who wasn't allowed to teach female students with the door shut because there'd been so many complaints about him (and he got at least a couple of girls pregnant IIRC).

I agree with you Stewie. However, I am also convinced that a lot of women lie about how much alcohol they drink during preggers because of the stigma attached to it. If people were really honest I am sure that no-one who only had two drinks would have a child with FAS.