No one has even considered that maybe the pregnant lady just wanted to have a filled wine glass in front of her (even though she wouldn’t drink). Depending on the situation and company, it’s polite to pour every one a full glass even if they have no intention of drinking it.
I’ve got a pregnant wife, and she would likely get incensed if a bartender or waiter said i can’t pour a glass. She’s had about 10 small single sips over the past 6 months og pregnancy.
And its amazingly hard to pin whose child will get FAS and whose won’t. Younger woman and first pregnancies are at lower risk for FAS - even when the alcohol consumption has been similar. Its been pointed out many times that most of Europe has been drinking a few glasses of wine a day for centuries - and Europeans may be a little strange, but it isn’t a whole region of people with FAS. I have a lovely cousin and a lovely uncle whose mothers were both extreme lushes. Both are normal and bright individuals. My uncle even has two perfectly normal siblings (although one is an alcoholic himself).
One of my big rants is on the subject of “public pregnancies” - particularly the alcohol issue. So many women I know have spent nine months of their life under extreme stress because they had a glass of wine with dinner before they realized they were pregnant. They’ve denied themselves things like champagne toasts at their sister’s wedding - or had those things denied to them. They’ve gotten dirty looks drinking near beer in bars. One of my girlfriends is on the heavy side and gets the “drinking while pregnant” backlash every time she goes out (in the six years I’ve known her, she has never dated and has always looked pregnant).
This isn’t to say women should drink while pregnant, but there are a whole lot of things women should and shouldn’t do while pregnant. I should have eaten far more green and yellow vegetables and whole grains than I did and I should have gotten more exercise early on. I should have disposed of all the cats in the house before getting pregnant - as neither was really good about litterbox behavior. I should have taken the prenatal vitamins (even though they made me barf). I should have given up caffiene completely - rather than just limited myself.
Heh, when I found out I was pregnant, my OB-GYN said that I could only have one glass of wine per day. Of course, I haven’t had much of a yearning for something so syrupy but I have had a glass or two over the course of the pregnancy. Does that make me a horrible future mother? BTW, the only thing that really affected me was one small glass of champagne that gave me a HUGE hangover the next day and a raging headache for two more days. This was from three sips!!
I was told not to eat cheeses made from unpasteurized milk (not a problem in the US, though, I think they’re illegal there), yes, because of the threat of listeria.
I think it’s really awful for someone to dictate what another person can or can’t do. My cousin was refused a glass of wine while she was visibly pregnant (this was in Wisconsin). What’s preventing the future mother from buying a bottle of vodka and chugging it in her home at 2 am? In my opinion, one can’t and shouldn’t police pregnant women, hasn’t anyone heard of the hormones??
A friend of a friend was absolutely tied in knots because one of her “well meaning”[sup]1[/sup] “friends”[sup]2[/sup] told her that she should abort her baby because she’d had a glass of wine before she even knew the pregnancy existed and therefore her baby was going to have FASD.
'Cus clearly, being totally stressed out about how you’ve rendered your baby ‘horribly retarded’ is better than having a glass of wine before you even know you’re pregnant.
1: nosy, jealous
2: bitch
I agree that one should not dictate to a pregnant woman in this case, although I sympathize with the bartender. Even if the bartender has a legal right to deny her, I would stay out of it. Should clerks refuse to sell cigarettes to pregnant women? There are many things that are harmful or risky for a pregnant woman to do and it should be between her and her doctor what she decides to participate in.
I chose not to drink during my pregnancy but I did eat cold cuts a few times and took a few over the counter medicines that were not in the “100% proven safe” category. There’s a lot of grey area, some choose to do one thing but would never do another. The majority of women are very protective of their own health and their baby’s and know very well that excess drinking is risky, the bartender is not educating her or saving her baby by not serving her.
Oh, my, word.
Yeah, another MYOB vote here. A. None of his business and B. He was obviously underinformed and C. None of his business!
Several years ago, a dear friend contacted me after an eight month disappearance. She told me she was pregnant, she needed help, etc. So I took her to the doctor, and as the nurse is filling out the paperwork, she starts reading down the list of recreational drugs, asking mom-to-be if she’s used any of them in the last year.
“Tobacco?” “Yes”
“Alcohol?” “Yes”
“Marijuana?” “Yes”
“Cocaine?” “Yes”
“Heroin?” Yes"
“LSD?” “Yes”
“Ecstacy?” “Yes”
(The nurse is turning white at this point. ) All the way down the list, there’s not a single thing that MTB hasn’t been using. Finally, the nurse staggered out to get the doctor. He came in and looked at the sheet, blanched and said, “How much of this are you still using, MTB?” “Only cigarettes,” she said (truthfully). “As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I stopped everything else. Cold turkey. It was really hard.” (She also didn’t know she was pregnant until nearly 5 months.) “Don’t stop smoking!” The doctor exclaimed. “It would be just too hard on your system, and I’d rather you smoke cigarettes than go back to all this!”
So she kept smoking, under doctor’s orders. But the comments she would get if she smoked in public were truly horrifying. People are just too invasive for words. Four months later, she gave birth to a beautiful, healthy baby boy who’s the smartest little whippet I’ve ever met. She’s continued smoking through the years, including during two other pregnancies, producing another beautiful fat baby boy and a sweet, wonderful baby girl. The smallest of the three was 9 lbs, 3 oz. So much for low birth weight!
Two morals to this story. One, shut the heck up. You never know all of someone’s medical history. Unless you’re her doctor, what you think doesn’t matter.
And two, cigarettes are more addictive than cocaine or heroin.
(This story is not meant to encourage or even condone smoking during pregnancy - just an anecdote of why sometimes it *is * recommended by doctors!)
Yep.
All these stories about women drinking, smoking, and still giving birth to perfectly healthy children has led me to wonder how much truth there really is to claims that these substances would truly harm a fetus.
I’m starting to think maybe the only way a pregnancy can be harmed is if you were a 2 pack-a-day smoker who binge drinks every night.
I’d just like to draw attention to the point that they were discussing whether to serve this woman within earshot. It’s this, I feel, that is the height of rudeness. Surely a simple, “I’m very sorry, madam, but I’m not sure I should be serving you alcohol; will you please accept (some soft drink) while I go and check?” would suffice. Or even simpler, “Are you sure you should be drinking?”
These things aren’t well understood (actually, I’m not sure anything is well understood). However, what is known is that humans are very resilliant. Women who drink a glass of wine once in a blue moon, are healthy, and eat a good diet, don’t have babies with FASD. In fact, functional alcoholics who are still eating generally don’t have babies with severe impairment. In order to have a pronounced impairment, a woman has to work at it - binge drinking daily with zero food intake for a week, for instance - generally, I’d be willing to bet that babies concieved under those circumstances wern’t planned.
Anyhow - ignorant, uninformed comments about any aspect of a stranger’s pregnancy are pretty well always ill advised, IMHO.
Just as obnoxious, as far as I’m concerned. If she wasn’t sure, she wouldn’t have ordered the drink.
Well, yeah. Unless you hit just the right window when just the right chromosome is replicating or the right cell is dividing, and then who knows?
I think the problem is twofold:
American women, like all Americans, are not so good at “moderation” sometimes.
American doctors don’t want to counsel moderation, have a woman become a binge drinker and then get sued for malpractice. (Or, for the less cynical, doctors don’t want to counsel moderation, have a woman become a binge drinker and end up with a very sick baby.)
It does happen JustPlainBryan, but I wonder what the numbers are. In ten years of teaching, I’ve seen maybe a half dozen FAS affected kids, compared to maybe five times that many with Down’s Syndrome. Thing is, it can be pretty awful when it does happen and I don’t blame some parents for being a bit over-cautious.
You know in cartoons when a character gets so mad that steam comes out of his ears? In the event some idiot said the above to me, I would look exactly like that, except my head would probably pop off from irritation as well. I mean, seriously, WTF? Because some uninformed moron read a blurb about pregnancy and alcohol in TV Guide and decided they were educated on the subject, I’m supposed to humor their ignorance? No, I’d be having a talk with the manager, owner, regular barflys, the cleaning people, the local media, and I might even call their mother and tell her she raised an effing dolt.
My first instinct would be to mind my own business. But on reflection, I can see a problem. It’s the bartender’s responsibility to not serve anyone underage. If a woman is obviously pregnant, it’s reasonable to assume she’s not going to abort it, or that it’s legally beyond the abort date. So now you’re serving two people, one of whom is definitely underage.
If the bartender waited a month or two and this woman came in with her baby in a baby carriage and asked the bartender to fill it’s baby bottle with wine or beer, and the bartender did, the bartender could very well go to jail.
It probably does no harm to have a drink during the 8th month of pregnancy. It also does no harm to give a ten month old some alcohol. It also does no harm to give a 19 year old alcohol. But that’s your choice as a parent. The bartender doesn’t have that choice. They are expected to butt into your business and make a judgment about you each and every time you ask for a drink.
What I’m saying is, if you want to give your baby some liquor at home, that’s more or less your choice. But if you’re going to ask a bartender to serve your baby liquor, don’t be too offended if the bartender struggles with some moral ambiguities, if not legal ones.
Can I ask how you knew they were FAS affected?
I ask because my son is adopted. In adoption circles, its quite common for peditricians to tag our kids FAS for darn near anything. Once they find out you don’t know much about the birthmom, they (and, unfortunately, a lot of adopted parents) are ready to blame the birthmom for every learning disability say it must have been booze.
Not that there isn’t such a thing as FAS, but I sometimes wonder if it is - in adoptive children at least - overdiagnosed.
I fully endorse these two statements. Slightly separatly, my gran was an obstinate smoker, and was allowed a packet a day, while in the advanced stages of lung cancer. Basically, the doctors said ‘why stop her now?’.
Would that same bartender say to a 36 year old woman, “Lady, advanced maternal age is linked with extremely high rates of Down’s Syndrome. You shouldn’t be pregnant at your age!”?
She’d kill him. And rightly so.
Dangerosa, according to the CDC,
Generally, it’s the small eye opening and tiny stature linked with behavior problems that clues most teachers in to the problem.
I was a very heavy smoker before I got pregnant. I tried really hard to quit and got down to 2-3 a day but I just couldn’t shake those last couple. I was in tears at the doctors one day because I was feeling so guilty about what those cigs might be doing and the doctor said, “If you repeat this I will deny it but the stress of giving up is more harmful to the baby. Don’t smoke more then 3 a day”. I have a very healthy son, who was born a month early (but not small for his gestation). His early birth was caused by something else.
Yes, I’m well aware of what the CDC says are the clues for FAS. Are you saying you make the diagnosis as a teacher by what the child looks like and that they misbehave? Or do you have a medical history you are working from? And if you are working from a medical history, do you know the maternal history during pregnancy?