Pregnancy: To Drink or Not to Drink

When you’re pregnant, is drinking completely off limits? Or is a little bit okay? Call me old school, but I always considered drinking out of bounds during pregnancy. My stance on that has gotten stronger in the past few years since I became a mother myself. I adopted my son when he was 10 and he’s diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Effects. When I see him struggling to make decisions, when relatively simple multiple step directions completely stymie him, or we’re once again dealing with his inability to understand cause and effect it’s really hard for me to find any reasonable excuse for drinking even a drop of alcohol while pregnant.

According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, no amount of alcohol can be considered safe when pregnant. But some other health professionals disagree. In fact, a study published in the International Journal of Edidemiology stated that light drinking (one to two per week) doesn’t affect the baby.

The NY Post found that more women are starting to drink while pregnant. Dr. Randi Hutter Epstein, mom of four and author of Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank, told the NY Post, “The truth is, if you look at who’s born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, their mothers were alcoholics — not ‘one drink a week’ women.”

The National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome would probably disagree with Dr. Hutter Epstein. According to the NOFAS website “There is no known safe level of alcohol consumption during pregnancy. The best thing to do is stop drinking during your pregnancy or if you are planning to become pregnant.”

What do you think? When it comes to pregnancy … to drink or not to drink?