I’m not buying this one. Are pregnant women really so fragile we have to tip-toe around them lest we upset them and damage their babies? Are their babies really so easily damaged? And is the health of the baby really so important that we, the general public have to take an active role in women’s not harming their own babies? Good God man, just give her some alcohol or she’ll go into the shakes and miscarriage right here!
The OP didn’t say the bartender refused to serve this woman, he just talked about it with the server. Spare your bartender the histrionics, and get your doctor to buy you a drink next time. Or find a bar where they don’t give a shit who drinks what, or how much.
I agree that no one should dictate to a pregnant woman whether she should drink or not. It’s up to women to look at the evidence and decide for themselves, and everyone else can STFU.
However, the “the stress of not drinking is worse than the alcohol” line sounds like BS to me.
Alcohol is, literally, a poison. The sensation of “being drunk” is your body’s natural reaction to being poisoned.
It just doesn’t make logical sense that drinking poison is better than not drinking poison.
As explained to me: I’m an anxious depressive. A glass of wine a day they have a pretty good idea of what it doesn’t do to a fetus. They had no idea what anti anxiety meds would do, and if it got bad and I went into the depression spiral, harming myself is going to do no good at all to either me or my daughter.
I had one anxiety attack, drank a glass of wine (after discussing it with my OB - which is where I got this), went to sleep, woke up fine.
(yes, Alice, for the general population of adoptees, FAS is more common. For international adoptees from Eastern Europe its a real concern. My self selecting sample is Asian adoptees, where alcohol abuse by women is very uncommon as its still culturally inappropriate for women to drink in Korea and China (changing, but still not what you’d have with US or EE birthmoms). So it would be statistically odd to have a lot of FAS in the set)
Then I’d suggest that you’d not be doing very well in the fight against ignorance; you’d be confusing ignorance with stupidity. What exact issue do you have with someone admitting their ignorance and going to check?
Maybe he can’t tell her what to drink, but I’d damn sure have her sign a waiver saying that she understood the risks and forfeited any right to sue in the event of “worst case scenario.” Why? Because even though she’d have been warned out the wazoo about drinking while pregnant, she might decide, “Well, they shouldn’t have served it to me!” And there would be a judge and jury stupid enough to buy her argument, just like there are those willing to financially reward people who KNEW smoking was dangerous, but did it anyway, got cancer, and sued. The old “it’s everyone’s fault but mine” syndrome. Well, I’d be absolutely certain my ass was covered, that’s for sure!
That way perhaps he could “MHOB” without losing it.
He or she can go check all they want to; I’ll be talking to the manager. I’m not asking them whether or not, in their opinion, I should have a drink. I’m the pregnant one and I’ve made an educated decision to have a drink. Period. It’s none of their business. And anyone remotely educated on the subject knows there are many schools of thought on the issue; i.e., for every doctor who says one should not drink, there’s a doctor saying a glass of wine every once in a while is fine. There simply is no definitive answer. If the server is that torn up over it, or if the server believes strongly in one school of thought, he/she shouldn’t be serving.
p.s. The above is hypothetical; I choose not to drink at all.
My friend just finished her PhD studying Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, including full reviews of all the literature, analyses of kids with FAS and their mothers, and turning lots of pregnant rats into alcoholics.
The one-sentence answer: a pregnant woman has to down bottles of liquor every week to deliver a kid with FAS.
If the pregnancy prohibition people were right, every human born in Europe in the past 3,000 years would have FAS.
One drink ain’t gonna affect anybody, or their fetus.
But I thought there is a continnum, of which FAS is just the most severe result. Cite. This means that moderate or minimal consumption of alcohol can result in neurological and other congenital defects, just not ones severe enough to be diagnosed as FAS.
For a physician’s diagnosis (the kind medical insurance will accept,) it’s FAS or nothing. Anecdotally, in parenting groups and even among researchers, yes, there is a continuum of symptomology, falling under the name “Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders”. It does not logically follow that therefore moderate or minimal consumption of alcohol causes moderate or minimal FASD. (It may feel intuitively “right,” but the statistics simply do not bear out this hypothesis.) The fact is that moderate or minimal consumption has been overwhelmingly shown to be safe, and that lesser forms of FASD are not caused by moderate or minimal consumption of alcohol.
Perhaps they’re caused by biochemical differences in women who are heavy drinkers, perhaps some heavy drinkers binge drink sporadically, perhaps some heavy drinkers who have decent nutrition bear children with minimal FASD. There are many possibilities, and they should be investigated further, but minimal to moderate alcohol consumption has been ruled out.
Sprouts are also out as they cannot be throroughly washed. Raw vegatables unless washed very thoroughly are out. I did not trust any restaurant salad while I was pregnant.
Salami is also a danger because of nitrates. Nitrates should be limited, but if you have them, have something acidic with vitamin c in it at the same time. That somehow is supposed to prevent them from forming the bad stuff that may damage the fetal heart.
On the other side chocolate has benefits for both mother and child.
Tell me, would that bartender refuse to sell her hot wings with fresh blue cheese dressing and celery sticks? Does he make sure the women he server are not going to be nursing later? He is an ass and if smart, the management would, if they knew he did this, warn him to stop and if he refused, fire him.
When alcohol is the most dangerous to fetal development, pregnancy is not visible. This is not about real concern for mother or child but petty, controlling, self rightious minding of others business.
Don’t forget the critical word on the page you cited: possible.
Just about anything is possible, including killing my pregnant wife by inducing an embolism during cunnilingus. Yeah, there’s only one case on record-- world wide-- and it’s somewhat suspect, but that ‘pregnancy classic’ What to expect when you’re expecting tells couples to practice safe muff-diving to avoid accidental death :rolleyes:
Much of the literature on pregnancy available in the western world comes down firmly on the ‘fear and loathing’ side of the scale, with very little evidence to justify any of the various prohibitions. (Probably a hangover from the ‘delicate flower’ period during England’s history.) And admittedly, if you’re an agency like the CDC, how do you determine a safe level of alcohol for all pregnant women, from age 11 to 61, weighing anywhere from 80 to 400 pounds? You can’t, so you take the easy way out and and say there’s no safe level.
But realistically, if you’re a healthy woman, eating properly, and getting enough rest, exercise, and nutrients, you’re going to have a healthy baby even if you indulge in the occasional glass of wine. And even if you don’t eat properly, smoke constantly, binge drink, and go into the hospital thinking you have appendicitis but come out with a full-term baby (like my cousin in T.O.), you can still have a healthy, well-adjusted, kid. And if you’ve got a good support group, your kid, even if he does have FAS, is going to be able to overcome all sorts of drawbacks.
As far as we can tell, nurture is just as important as nature (until someone does the double-blind study involving 1000 pairs of twins separated at birth).
As recently as the Sixties, to my knowledge, doctors in the UK* encouraged* pregnant women to down a pint of “stout” (ie Guinness, Mackeson’s) a day “for the good of the baby”. My late MIL would still complain bitterly (sorry for the pun, UKers ) to her dying day of having to force down a pint of that awful stuff each day when expecting my ex-hubby.
Ditto, almost word-for-word, except I had an extremely healthy full-term daughter. To this day I still feel very guilty about it, though.
) to her dying day of having to force down a pint of that awful stuff each day when expecting my ex-hubby.