The Problem. The subject of alcohol and fetal development is highly emotional. In general, people often have strong beliefs about drinking during pregnancy. For example, some restaurant servers refuse to serve alcohol to women who appear to be pregnant. One women become frantic when she discovered she had eaten salad with wine vinegar dressing. This […]

Alcohol during pregnancy is a major societal concern. It’s clear that repeatedly heavy alcohol drinking by pregnant women increases the risk of negative effects on the fetus. These include premature birth, small size, and low birth weight. The most serious  such possible effect is fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). However, much less is known about the […]

Scare Tactics Lead to Abortions The Sun-News in Australia reported on scare tactics used to discourage drinking during pregnancy. Experts warned that such tactics can lead women to have abortions. Scare tactics were abandoned in the Province of Quebec in Canada. That was after medical authorities realized an unintended consequence. Many women had taken a […]

Pregnancy and Drinking Alcohol Is there any difference between planned and unplanned pregnancy and drinking during early pregnancy? Doctors at Vanderbilt University Medical Center investigated this question. They studied 5,036 women. All were participants in the Right from the Start program. The doctors had the women’s demographic, reproductive, and behavioral data. That included alcohol drinking […]

Drinking while Pregnant Study Drinking while pregnant and its effects on the size of infants at birth has been studied in earlier research. This study examined the association between drinking while pregnant and children’s height and weight from birth to age 10. Data came from 7,597 mother-child pairs. Occasional or light daily drinking while pregnant […]

I.  Background Drinking alcohol during pregnancy is a subject that elicits very strong emotion. Some pregnant women have actually become frantic upon realizing they had eaten salad with wine vinegar dressing. They feared their children would be born suffering from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). Servers have told pregnant women ordering wine with dinner in restaurants […]

Moderate drinking during pregnancy. That’s an important subject. To learn more, doctors studied 4,496 women. They followed the women throughout their pregnancies and after the birth of their children. The researchers focused on low to moderate drinking during pregnancy. The first trimester (three months) of pregnancy is crucial. Such drinkers had a large reduced risk of […]