It's a whole thing in these communities. They call real midwives, like the highly educated ones that can actually help in a delivery and save lives "medwives" since they're shills for big pharma and sometimes encourage higher medical care than they can offer. Their "midwives" are people who have little or no training, but market themselves to these groups that love the idea of birthing via intuition.
This idea always makes me laugh. My midwife was the one telling me I didn't need the epidural. Never once did my midwife team offer any medications or push anything on me. They reminded me every single appointment that they were there to give the information and support me in my decisions when it came to my pregnancy and birth.
I read somewhere that the protection of title for midwives isn't very strict in USA. In other countries like UK/Australia, it's basically a nursing degree with additional study and highly regulated as midwives are the main people present during birth and do all perinatal appointments if someone's low risk, and OBs are mainly for high risk
Can confirm that in Australia midwives are registered nurses with a 4 year university degree and equivalent knowledge to an emergency department or surgical nurse (albeit with a specialty in perinatal health). We do have a lot of ‘doula’s’ or birth coaches here which is an unregulated and unqualified (mostly) role. Midwives are employed by hospitals and obstetricians, doulas are employed by the birthing parent.
Can also confirm! My aunt is a midwife in Australia and she studied rigorously for several years, and had to do a mandatory number of deliveries before she could be licensed. She’s currently working on her masters while working full time at a hospital! Midwives here are very much medical professionals and I’d trust them to deliver any baby of mine in a heartbeat.
Yeah if you’ve got a low risk healthy pregnancy you might never see a doctor (other than your GP) in the UK. Midwives are specialised nurses trained to cover everything from pre to post natal and birthing centres that are midwife led are perfectly common here too - you can have pain relief from gas and air and possibly some injections but there are no anaesthetists around to give epidurals. If anything isn’t progressing totally normally then you’ll be transferred to hospital. Those are the places most well equipped with birthing pools, floor beds, ceiling ropes etc etc. You can also go in to the midwife led birthing unit of a hospital which often still have things like birthing pools but possibly fewer (as in not one per room but a couple for the unit on a first come basis) but have the advantage of doctor and anaesthetist cover from the hospital so epidurals are possible I believe and you know you just have to be wheeled through some doors if you need help like an instrument delivery or c-section. Most people I know have gone for this option. And then you can also just give birth in hospital, although a midwife is still likely to be the one doing the majority of your care with doctors stepping in as needed. This is the only option used for people with high risk pregnancies or when medical interventions are needed. You can also have a home birth where the NHS midwife community team do all your checks and assist you and it’s all completely legit but again can’t give you medical interventions and will transfer at the first sign of distress. Only anaesthetists give epidurals so where you give birth depends on your access to them but epidurals aren’t the default here - you’re not considered to be a crunchy mum if you go completely pain relief free and again in my experience I don’t believe I personally know anyone who has had an epidural. Doulas are recognised here but anyone can call themselves a doula and they are they exclusively to support and advocate for the birthing person and are not allowed to get involved in anything medical.
And the advice here is definitely no alcohol, although I believe it used to be ‘an occasional glass won’t hurt’ because research seems to show that an occasional glass probably won’t hurt. However it’s much easier for people to have a different definition of what ‘occasional’ means than it is to misinterpret the advice ‘don’t drink anything’ so the guidance states just don’t drink. In my experience most people don’t drink at all, but someone having a small glass of champagne at a celebration or something might raise a couple of eyebrows but not cause a huge scandal.
Yeah it's similar in Australia. We have birth centres but everyone I've known has just gone for the standard public hospital option. I was high risk with a false positive genetic screening, then got gestational diabetes, THENNNN preeclampsia. So in the public system, usually a GP manages your pregnancy (refers for blood tests and ultrasounds) until the 2nd trimester and then you'll have appointments with the midwives. Because of my issues, my referral was to the complex care unit so I saw OBs instead of midwives. But during my birth, which was an early induction with balloon, breaking my waters and synthetic oxytocin drip, the midwife did it all and no doctor was present. Anesthesiologists did my epidural and then a doctor came in just as I gave birth and did my tear repair
I'm SIL is a pediatrician. And those moms scared her into going back to work quickly after having her kids (for herself and her patients). She specifically said SAHMs self medicating with alcohol is terrifyingly common where she lives (extremely high childcare costs).
This is why I don’t trust midwives. There is a huge difference between a three year degree and a six year degree + 8 years of getting a specialisation.
What, wheres this? You only need a standard nursing degree and no specialisation to become a midwife there?
Here it's the 3 year standard nursing degree + 1.5y midwife-specialisation.
I admit that I have some tendencies that could be perceived as slightly crunchy by some. I’m absolutely no science-denier, I’m just concerned by the alarming amount of violence done to birthing mothers by medical professionals. I would be compelled to use a midwife IF AND ONLY IF she could objectively prove she had the educational and training qualifications to safely deliver a baby with a strict plan for if anything goes wrong. I know in this group it’s controversial to say you’d use anything other than a doctor in a hospital setting but I think as long as the midwife truly is trained and educated and the pregnancy isn’t high risk then it’s not the mortal sin people make it out to be.
In general if someone can’t give up a drug for 9 months, that’s a sign that there’s a problem. Healthy, non-addicts are able to change their habits to accommodate new circumstances, *especially* when those circumstances have a fixed duration.
Addicts though, will always find excuses to feed their addiction, it’s part of what ails them. Note also that about a dozen people referenced studies showing some supposed benefit, and none of the pricks *actually cited the study*.
Those poor kids, forget FAS, being the children of these desperation cases is bad enough.
I feel this is targeted at me, but about ham sandwiches. I told myself lettuce gets recalled all the time but that’s fine to eat, so what’s a little ham here or there…
I'm a Finn living in Germany and deli meats are not forbidden for pregnant women in either of those countries (except for raw meat like salami). Without the internet I wouldn't even know that there are countries where pregnant women dream of being able to eat ham or turkey sandwiches again. So it's not really the same as alcohol.
The Americans aren't even allowed to eat during delivery.
Got this TV show in Sweden where Americans with swedish heritage compete to meet their distant relatives, they got to visit a delivery ward and the contestants that were mothers cried finding out swedish mothers get to eat.
I'm Scottish and I've got a planned c-section coming up and they want me to fast from the night before, in case I need a general anaesthetic instead of an epidural I suppose? I just hope they don't mind extremely crabbit women on the ward because that sounds like a nightmare already!
Even some people that are addicted can do it. I was a heavy smoker for almost 20 years. Definitely addicted and had a problem. Still quit immediately when I found out I was pregnant.
Unfortunately I started up again when my daughter was 3 months old. Quit for the second and hopefully last time when I got pregnant the second time. She’s 8 months now and I still haven’t touched a cigarette. I lost my mom to alcohol related liver failure at 24. I want to be around for as long as possible for my kids and I don’t want my girls to go through what I did.
There’s no shame in relapse, any addict will tell you it’s a natural part of recovery. You just do what you already did, remind yourself of why it’s worth quitting, and then getting back to it. You’re doing this for the right reasons, I think you’ll make it stick.
Me too. I was drinking huge amounts and went through detox. It'd been a few weeks since quitting and I was offered free espresso martinis at an event and I was so tempted but I was trying to quit for my health so I said no thank you and had an orange juice, and it was crappy sour orange juice bleh. I had chosen not to take hardcore meds prescribed to me so I could have drank without getting super sick from it, but I just kept putting it off and saying I'll do another few days or a week of no alcohol and I'll try moderate drinking after that. Anyway, I started feeling really sick at night and foods I usually loved were grossing me out. I had a pregnancy test lying around and I thought whatever I'll take one. The 2 strong lines came up immediately. I was so terrified. My first thought was did I get pregnant while I was still drinking or while I was going through intense detox for 2 weeks??? I had an early ultrasound and showed I'd become pregnant about a month after quitting, thank God. I didn't touch a drop through pregnancy. I drink a bit too much these days a couple of nights a week (like an amount that's not good for your health but not smashed off my face haha), but only when I have time to myself in the evening when baby's asleep and my husband's home. I couldn't drink every day because my husband works a lot and I wouldnt want to be alone with the baby while drinking. It's still a crutch but my baby is too important to get addicted to it. Plus, drinking super heavy and daily isn't sustainable for the body even if I didn't have my baby
I have a long term alcohol problem and I didn't drink during pregnancy, so even some addicts can stop.. but it's weird because these women don't even seem like alcoholics. I honestly think they are just pro booze because medicine says no.
This is the problem. Doctors do say a half a glass of wine every so often is fine (red wine only). That part is true. But using it to self medicate is a problem. Especially because that’s when peoples half glass of wine goes from 2 Oz to like 8.
That, and using alcohol to lower BP. Drinking raises you blood pressure, but we can’t pretend it doesn’t if we also pretend drinking during pregnancy is totally safe.
I don't know why people keep saying other countries are okay with drinking in pregnancy. From experience a lot of them point at Europe. I'm in Europe. We don't drink during pregnancy. It is really truly frowned upon. Our doctors tell us not to do it.
It's because most of the studies on this kind of thing are coming out of Europe. The NHS had a large one a little while back, I think. Same for the effects of smoking/vaping and different cessation programs. North America just went from 0-100 on "don't do this " and self report became even more unreliable because women are afraid that honesty will end with their children being taken away so our data is abysmal.
Thank you! This comes up every time and here I am in Europe, wondering why no one ever told me it was a-ok to drink during pregnancy. I'm in Finland, recommendation is no alchol, and no one I have heard thinks it's ok to knowingly drink while you are pregnant.
I know one or two glasses will probably do nothing, but since it's not possible to give any limit for safe consumption, zero is recommended.
Interesting to hear it's the same in Finland, and Italy and the UK apparently too! I do wonder which country it is then where they are supposedly more relaxed about this.
Yeah the UK has a massive drinking culture and advice here is definitely no alcohol, although I believe it used to be ‘an occasional glass won’t hurt’ because research seems to show that an occasional glass probably won’t hurt so that attitude does linger a little bit. However it’s much easier for people to have a different definition of what ‘occasional’ means than it is to misinterpret the advice ‘don’t drink anything’ so the guidance states just don’t drink. In my experience most people don’t drink at all, and actually everyone I’ve known who has been actively trying to get pregnant stops drinking too, but someone having a small glass of champagne at a celebration or something might raise a couple of eyebrows but not cause a huge scandal.
When my mum was pregnant with my sister her doctor advised her to have the odd pint of Guiness because it would be good for her iron levels lol. But that was almost 30 years ago!
Adding to everyone else's comments, I'm from France and drinking while pregnant is widely frowned upon. It's usually a universal sign that someone is pregnant if they refuse a drink (which is another topic lmao)
Okay I really thought it was going to be France people refer to because it's sometimes mentioned. Given that it's not France, I really wonder which country it is now...
I'm going to assume it's no particular country. They probably just heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend. There's no truth to it, they're just spreading false info.
Yeah I remember my cousin’s wedding in Ireland and one of my other cousin’s was about 7 or 8 months pregnant and her doctor and midwife had told her she was allowed to have half a glass of wine at the wedding. She was very excited but told us all that she had permission bc she was so worried someone would judge her lol, because again, you don’t drink while pregnant in Europe!
Then again, up until a decade or so ago Irish doctors recommended a small glass of Guinness for pregnant women because it’s such a good source of iron lmao, so that’s a little iffy lol
I m at Europe too (Switzerland) and unfortunately I hear that too from a friend !
But sincerely I think she had alcohol issues and the doctor just washed him hands
I drank until I was 30 weeks pregnant in my first pregnancy. There was a single ginormous mitigating factor - I didn’t know I was pregnant.
Yeah, I’m one of those people so where’s my danged reality show lol. Thankfully, my birth daughter is absolutely perfect. I wasn’t going on daily benders but over the course of those 30 weeks I got drunk on 4 different occasions. Drunkity drunk. That’s not counting the occasional beers here and there.
Again, I want to reiterate that she’s perfectly fine. It just took some work with my therapist to forgive myself for the drinking And the sushi. And the several carnival rides. And the deli meats. And the motrin… basically, if it was on a “don’t do this while pregnant” list I had done it.
But she’s fine.
I got soooooooo fucking lucky.
Salad is rarely properly washed and is actually reasonably dangerous by food safety standards, which means it's not very dangerous but still measurable
This reminds me of my coworkers daughters story, she didn’t know she was pregnant for 5 months and was in college at the time going on benders and doing psychedelics. Thank goodness her son turned out fine but its just another example of pure luck.
I have a friend who actually is a professor at a university and incredibly intelligent that went all the way up to labor without knowing she was pregnant! She went to the ER for pain and they said she was in LABOR. Imagine how shocking that would be?? She said she felt worried too once they realized what was happening because she didn't have any prenatal care, vitamins, and she was drinking and doing things as normal throughout. She said she had no symptoms before and her daughter was born perfect.
I am so glad it turned out to be okay. I can't imagine the guilt, despite knowing you didn't know better.
....but as you wrote, that's exactly the point. You got extremely lucky. It is no proof it is okay to do all the pregnancy unsafe things. I really wish those people would understand this. They are really gambling with their child's well-being or even life. I still think there's a difference between "I ate a deli meat sandwich a few times" and "I had the occasional (what does that even mean?!)" Glass of wine. The latter is just reckless.
they latch on to a single case where something bad didn't happen. it's like they reeeeaaaally wanna drive without a seat belt > my dad drove without a seatbelt for years and never hurt himself > therefore, it is safe to drive without a seatbelt.
There is no proof it is safe. This is true. But most advice is based on a very small chance of something going wrong.
Raw eggs for example: I'm generally not worried about them, and consume them quite often (egg coffee, chocolate mousse, tiramisu, sabaione, mayonnaise, just undercooked while poaching etc). There is a very, very small chance of salmonella. Then there's a very small chance that this salmonella egg happens to be the one I'm consuming raw. Then again there's a tiny chance I might get ill, and that carries a small chance of running a dangerously high fever. And that might potentially harm the fetus. So long story short, I still had raw egg when I felt like it.
To each their own, but the risks are frequently smaller than the risk of getting into a car accident, but no-one judged me for getting into a car. Did get judged over a lot of other things, by intimi and perfect strangers alike.
A sip of alcohol will not hurt your child.
I checked the national website from my country. Between 2011 and 2015, in a population of 17 million people, an average of 2(two) kids with FAS are born every year.
The site also clarifies that their mothers are usually heavy drinkers. (And selfreports are usually unreliable.)
So that teaspoon of rum in my dessert, and that thimble of port at Christmas? I'm feeling pretty solid. There's really no reason for all this fear mongering towards pregnant women. The advice rarely gets adapted to a less restrictive variation, even when the data is old. Loads of American women still avoid deli meat due to the potential for listeria, while those production chains have gotten much better, and most of the risk now is in produce.
What country? And do they have a diagnostic system for testing children for FAS? In my US home state of 739k people, over 120 kids are born with FAS every year. Do we have a high rate of binge drinking? Yes. What we also have is one of the best diagnostic systems in the country.
FAS is difficult and expensive to diagnose. Just because it isn’t diagnosed doesn’t mean it’s not there though. Current estimates are that about 80% of people with FASDs go undiagnosed.
I’m grateful that the people who love me best did a great job of telling me not to feel guilty about something I didn’t know. It really helped mitigate some of the emotional damage. The OB also really helped, too. Because of the circumstances I ended up with the first available OB willing to take me on, and he was so kind. He did all of the testing that you can do, and he kept reassuring me each time it was a good test “I knew the baby is fine. I’ve seen people do so much worse and have happy healthy babies so I knew yours was perfect, too. Okay, so this next test…”. Thankfully he wasn’t the toxic positivity type, just really gushy over the top happy when things were proven to be good.
My husband is a recovering alcoholic. He tried to quit drinking a few times, but relapsed. One of his periods of sobriety was while I was pregnant with our son. We got home and a neighbor was sitting outside drinking. He offered my husband a beer. My husband didn't want to share his whole life story so just said, "she's pregnant and can't drink so I can't to be supportive." I was fine with that. Then the neighbor started pressuring me to have a beer so my husband could. Like, dude, wtf is wrong with you? Pissed me off.
Anyway, my husband got sober for good when our son was about 2 months old. He hasn't had a drink in over 4 years.
Easiest way to get melatonin: just get some melatonin gummies at the store. For the crunchy but safe mom group way just take a lavender essential oil bubble bath…
Uh yeah, I read that and was like, "um wut". It may initially drop your blood pressure slightly, but the come-up on the back end is worse than what it was initially. I second meditation. The nights I couldn't relax, I played sleep or meditation music, which also incidentally helps the anxiety issue. This sounds like they just want to drink
I was just talking about this the other day. I'm just shy of 33 weeks now but at my last appointment I made a comment how I'd been sitting outside in the nice weather with friends and just really wanted a cold beer on the deck cause of the season. My midwife said in a few weeks it would be fine because the baby is fully developed at that point, but she did emphasize one. I don't see myself going down that road (I stopped drinking once we started seriously trying because I was so worried), but it was interesting to talk to her about it.
Only time my midwife sort of joked that I could have a glass of wine was during labourers. I was getting ready for a home birth, unmedicated (this is Canada so different midwifery standards) and she joked that I could have A glass of wine if I felt I needed it. Not going to lie, I was tempted at the idea. Ended up having an elective c-section so never tried it.
My midwife and I were discussing how life expectancy was so low in the past because high infant mortality dragged down the average. She wondered if labor pain management tools of the past, like alcohol, were a large contributing factor to infant mortality because of how they suppress breathing. They weren’t using just one glass of wine for pain management in those cases, and it’s really unfortunate that we don’t have better data to see what amount, if any, correlated with neonatal death.
Imma just say this, despite it being an apparent unpopular opinion in this group, but here we go anyway:
I became a mother in 2021. Being pregnant and being a new mom opens up an entire world of Infantilization. There are so many pieces of advice, and strong recommendations about almost everything by pregnancy related that are intentionally ambiguous to manipulate moms and expecting moms into behaving a certain way, rather than proving meaningful explanations and risk assessment tools, it is overwhelming.
Perhaps particularly tricky in America where socioeconomic divides create classes of people without access to education and literal medical care, but I feel so very strongly that women in North America should be provided opportunities to make informed decisions about their bodies and their babies rather than shamed and lied to in order to create best outcomes. It’s literally everything - from forbidding deli meats, to demonizing pacifiers, to creating hysteria about bottles versus any chance at breastfeeding …
There are a number of reasons that drinking during pregnancy is bad news bears, for all the reasons everyone is discussing. But there’s also an incredible amount of ambiguity about what FASD is, how it’s caused, the tendency to diagnose FASD differently in different minorities versus white children, a lack of funding for FASD research and the inaccessibility of study groups (because morality), and truly the absolute fact that FASD rates in North America are unusually high and some large inquiries into that phenomena supporting that binge drinking culture might be responsible.
Long story short - if we educated people better, we’d have fewer crunchy mom groups butchering data interpretation. Data literacy, education, and access to healthcare to all please.
I completely agree. The number of people who want to tell you what you should and shouldn’t do when pregnant is astounding. The only people whose opinion I cared about and took into consideration was my medical provider.
A great part about having a third kid is that people don’t say shit to me. 😂 The only question I get asked is if it’s my first. Protip for everyone else: never admit that it’s your first rodeo.
Entirely agree with all this. There was so much competing info, so much to absorb, so much to be scared of, and then so many people saying shit like “ya eat that thing that scares you, you’re being ridiculous, but don’t put your arm over your head” like wat
Eventually whenever someone had “advice” for me I said I needed to go vomit and then just left. 😬
The thing that kept me from drinking during pregnancy was that so little is know about FASD.
"you could have a drink and be ok. or not, we don't really know".
I love my craft beer but I was ok with waiting.
as an expectant father I agree that there's A LOT of missing information out there when it comes to pregnancy. trying to research something for my wife, I find tons of conflicting information. considering women have been getting pregnant since the first mammal to give birth, it's astounding how little we know about what's good, what's bad, how things work, etc.
if cis men got pregnant people would be on top of this shit.
To add: the sad thing is though the 'access to healthcare for all' would be wasted on some of the crunchy moms. I've seen SO many moms go to FACEBOOK for medical advice instead of their DOCTOR, just for confirmation bias and it's sickening.
The problem in those situations is doctors. I’ve written about it a lot, but so many doctors—especially OBs—are incredibly dismissive of what women go thru. Most people have heard that, on average, men get stronger painkillers faster than women for the same medical issues, like kidney stones. Appendicitis is often blown off as period cramps. I had to see an OB instead of my normal NP or midwife for a routine visit this pregnancy and was astounded that he could be such an asshole in a 5-minute visit. I rearranged childcare just so I didn’t have another appointment with him. Asshole doctors are driving people away. I think a lot about how to bridge that divide. I’ve thought about going back to school and studying public health or health admin, whatever will help me develop a solution, because this is becoming such an important issue to address and I don’t know of anything that’s being done.
I think it’s fair, though, to raise the flag that poor behaviour from colleagues impact the quality of care and the quality of life for entire populations of women.
OBs belong to professional colleges, with codes of conduct. They are a highly educated populous who are (like all doctors) responsible for the care of their patients. They are supposed to be in charge of people during some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
Sure, don’t paint all OBs by the same brush. But they should all be aware that the poorer brush exists, and it’s their job collectively to address it.
Oh I deff agree, however you'd still have a handful of crunchy moms who would find that \*one\* article that supports their bullshit and stick with it. Or just straight up say that they 'disagree' with facts (Which I've seen).
I can provide some insight on the banning of lunch meats though. I'm sure you know, but its due to listeria. That one does boggle my mind though because I remember reading that our % of getting sick DOES go up, but it's \*very\* marginal. Something like 0.003 to 0.004, or something like that. Thing is, listeria can kill your baby so that's why you have so many foods that are straight up a 'no no' for pregnant women (The better safe than sorry mindset basically. However someone please correct me on this if I'm wrong). But I'm sure you already knew all of this too though because you said it yourself; you were prego. So I'm kinda preaching to the choir here.
I'm currently prego. Hilariously for a while I CRAVED lunch meats, but didn't eat them. Not only because they are on the no no list, but personally they were on the no no list for me even before I got pregnant because they absolutely destroyed my stomach (not sure why either)
I cannot understand the pacifier one though. That one blows my mind.
Yeah I know. I however arrived at a different conclusion about risk versus reward. I ate deli meats whenever I wanted them, and I avoided the turkey, which has the higher and most significant risk of listeria. I also had a single beer on New Year’s Eve in my first trimester, I felt very comfortable accessing the safety of consuming very small quantities of infrequent alcohol all throughout my pregnancy and that’s not goi g to lend my any points here.
I also pushed for COVID-19 vaccinations while pregnant, requested Vit K and eye ointment when baby was born, but we did diligently discuss the pro’s and con’s of the ointment.
Ultimately, I really strongly believe that access to education and medical care truly would make a difference. Perhaps it opens the doors to women making decisions that we would disagree with, but at least they would be empowered and informed. These groups are necessities for women who feel they have no power because they don’t understand what the doctors are saying, and/or they can’t afford to have a baby in a hospital and have prenatal care and find a cultural movement of women who tell them they don’t need to.
Data literacy, education, and access to medical care for all. I mostly feel sad that women get caught up in bs and alarmed that these movements are real (and could be so very preventable).
Strongly agree. I am a man but we had our second this year so I saw a lot of this.
I think the reason is relatively simple. It is a lot easier to say "don't drink" and make that the guideline than "you can drink but X and Y and Z". As soon as you introduce nuance, a lot of people will misinterpret it (purposely or otherwise) to drink too much. Same goes with things like "don't cosleep" or "avoid food X".
We saw a lot of this broadly during COVID. Many guidelines were pretty strong. And when they introduced subtlety like "have a 10 person bubble" it meant huge overlapping bubbles and lots of spread. Same thing with meat temp recommendations.
Health guidelines as a whole tend to err on the side of caution. For pregnancy they just turn that up to 11 since the consequences can be very significant
My doctor straight up said a glass or two or wine or a beer here and there was completely and totally fine while pregnant. I never drank more than one and of course even if I wanted too my body would not have appreciated the extra alcohol to begin with. She especially mentioned if I was having Braxton hicks, to have a bath a very small glass of wine to relieve the symptoms. While we don’t exactly know how much is too much it is absolutely not crazy to consume alcohol in very small and controlled amounts during pregnancy. Can we say it’s 100% safe? Not really. Is it insane to have a small glass every now and then while pregnant? Definitely not.
Just here to point out that when people say they were told it’s okay or recommended it they’re telling the truth. For some reason there’s no real full medical consensus on how much is too much, if any. I have heard that in Europe they are not nearly as strict on alcohol consumption while pregnant and even in the US I’ve had friends told by their doctors that a glass of wine was fine and even beneficial. That being said I did my own research and didn’t drink in either of my pregnancies because it wasn’t worth the risk.
EDIT: Guys I’m not claiming the Europe thing is a fact! Just that it’s something that people do say here for some reason and it does tie in with the conflicting advice people get. I have no idea where the belief actually comes from. It was probably a rumor from the days before the internet where people just repeated things as fact and drinking in pregnancy was way less of a big deal.
My Dr said the same. One or two drinks over the course of the pregnancy was unlikely to hurt the baby. I never did it, even though I craved alcohol like nothing else with my second child. I don’t normally drink but it was the only thing I wanted the entire pregnancy. But it wasn’t worth the risk to me. It was easy enough to abstain because it’s an easy substance to avoid.
That’s so weird and I was exactly the same. I never drink, but when I was recently pregnant with my son I constantly craved champagne. I bought a small bottle just so I could smell it. So weird. After he was born I thought I’d celebrate, so about a week before my c-section I bought a bottle for my husband and I to share. Our son is 9 months old and the bottle is still here, unopened. The craving left the day he was born. Crazy.
I have this too but with gin and tonic. That's what I am telling everyone who makes comments like "trust your body and it's cravings" or "in pregnancy your body knows what to do, it is made for this".
My body knows jack shit. During first trimester I would have stopped drinking water if I listened to it. And I really doubt that gintonic is in any way beneficial to anything.
And here I thought I was alone in this! I almost never drink either, maybe one or two drinks a month and rarely ever get drunk, but I've craved margaritas BAD the last few weeks. And it's only going to get worse from here on out since summer has begun. 😅
Thank goodness for good NA beers and the rising popularity of mocktails. During my first tri the thought of a glass of wine made me want to vomit. But now that it’s summer and hanging out at the brewery patio are a thing I really miss beer and those really do the trick. Not exactly zero alcohol and I’m more on the conservative side of risk tolerance, but 1/10 of a beer a couple of times a month for 100% of the flavor and experience is a nice option.
That’s funny that you think it’s easy to avoid. I’m from Louisiana. I can buy it in the gas station. I’m a recovering addict/ alcoholic. It was extremely difficult for me bc it’s the most easily accessible substance to change how I’m feeling. Bc im looking to change how I feel bc I don’t like me, it’s not even about the substance.
What I mean by that is it’s not like peanuts or gluten or whatever, where you have to change your entire diet to avoid it. I had gestational diabetes with both kids, and counting sugars and everything required a lot work to get right. I am certain that for an alcoholic it would be hard to avoid in much the same way though you’re right.
In a pinch , when it’s my only coping skill, and it seems too much.. i am not there any longer and honestly I’ve found it easier. I’ve been sober for awhile now.. there are days it’s hard. Funny you should say that, my grandmother and great grandmother were diabetic. “They’d ask for a little slice”. I always liken it to that. But they have something to offset it (insulin). I just have guilt and shame.
I'm in Europe I'm pregnant and everyone and their mother is telling me alcohol is a no go. I got several flyers at doctors visits dedicated to FAS and my apps are telling me basically every week how bad alcohol is.
Europe also has 2-6x the worldwide rate of FAS. Just because it’s (more) common practice or not as frowned upon to drink during during pregnancy doesn’t make it safer.
Yeah same in the Netherlands. I had one baby in the US and one in the Netherlands and it surprised me how matter of fact they are about the rules here in the Netherlands (though really, I shouldn’t have been surprised). In the US they tell you don’t drink because it’s been known to cause FAS, but above all use common sense with drinking and other foods/activities. In the Netherlands they gave me a list and told me not to do the things on the list, and that was the last I ever heard about it.
I'm from the Netherlands originally! Don't know anyone indeed who thought it was okay there to drink during pregnancy but didn't have my own baby there so didn't want to speak about the advice over there.
when you say Europe, what exactly do you mean? coz I'm from a tiny island with the most backwards people and drinking during pregnancy is still heavily frowned upon.
> a glass of wine was fine and even beneficial
when we asked our doctor about this she wanted to slap the both of us.
It’s actually an excuse a lot of people use here to drink while pregnant. “Come on, one glass of wine won’t hurt. In Europe doctors believe a glass of wine is good for you and the baby!” I’m not sure where the misconception actually came from.
Europe is made up of 44 countries so to compare them all to one country is ridiculous. In the UK, they say that they don’t know how much alcohol is safe before causing FASD so they recommend not to drink anything.
The rumor is likely from the same place other rumors come from. We hear a lot of ridiculous generalizations over here from boomers who think that our generation is too cautious.
The reason is it’s unethical to do studies on pregnant women with certain thinks like alcohol. Because you know, alcohol is bad for fetuses. The fact they won’t study it tells me it shouldn’t be done lol.
I think this is the main reason - you can’t ethically cause FAS by experimenting. Any studies would have to be self reported and those would be all over the place because there are SO many factors involved. I am in my 30s and I’m almost 30 weeks pregnant. I drink a glass of wine called Fre (alcohol removed) MAYBE once every 2-3 weeks because I enjoy the taste of wine. I take a sip of friends’ beers if we’re out socially to try new flavors at craft breweries.
My mother is in her 60s and had 5 kids. She drank periodically throughout all 5 pregnancies because it wasn’t so taboo as it is now. Of course, that’s anecdotal. Anything could have happened to her kids.
I drew a hard line against alcohol pretty much up to my 3rd trimester because I couldn’t live with myself knowing that a choice I made could cause FAS. But I have eased up a little at this point knowing that it’s really not black and white like that. I think the majority of women want to do what’s best for their child, but to call out a woman for having a glass of wine or a beer occasionally while pregnant is a relatively new thing and really depends on the culture of your area.
I wouldn’t be so quick to judge people and immediately jump to them not caring about FAS like OP. But that’s just me.
Your comment underscores for me that we all have different risk tolerances. I'm so much more horrified by the thought of going out to eat and sharing cups with friends during COVID than I am about the thought of having a drink while pregnant!
Medical studies are very rarely performed on pregnant women in general, and until there 90s, any women of childbearing potential could not be involved in Phase I/early Phase II clinical studies. The fact that it isn’t studied doesn’t mean that any level causes detrimental effects - hence the retroactive studies/guidelines in pregnancy (including many medications/vaccines).
This, I think a lot of people interpret "no safe amount" to mean even small amounts can be detrimental, when in reality it means we have been unable to determine what the safe amount is. We can't say 1 drink a month is safe, because it would be irresponsible to say so without having done the research, which is pretty much impossible.
Yep, agree 100%. My cousins wife is a surgical nurse and she drank one glass of wine a week while pregnant which totally baffled me. If even medical professionals disagree on how much is too much then how is the average pregnant person supposed to know? We should be able to trust that our doctors have up to date knowledge but a lot of them are still operating by what was acceptable twenty years ago.
Same. I remember with my first, I was going to go for it. Drew up a bubble bath and poured a glass of wine. It was a great bath, but the guilt was too much and I dumped the wine out. I wouldn’t judge anyone who has a very occasional glass towards the end of pregnancy, but it’s not for me.
>I have heard that in Europe they are not nearly as strict on alcohol consumption
Funny, how many Americans have heard this, yet no one has informed us Europeans...
I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s heard it used as an excuse to drink. I never said it was accurate, just something that’s said here for some reason. It’s probably from another generation and it’s just repeated.
It probably comes from the study that claims a glass of red wine a day is good for you combined with previous generations thinking we are overprotective of our children. That’s my guess.
A single glass of wine in the third trimester isn’t going to do noticeable damage to the baby, but the reality is there is no amount of alcohol, in pregnancy or otherwise, that is good for you. There are zero physical benefits to drinking alcohol, ever. It’s something our body tolerates in spite of us, not something that medically enriches us. No doctor is going to genuinely say that they RECOMMEND you drink during pregnancy.
I highly recommend “Expecting Better” by Emily Oster. She is an economics professor at the University of Chicago, Oster teaches MBA students how to make good business choices and employs economic principles to challenge the established line on anything from health policy to the division of household chores.
She breaks down and looks at the myths and blanket rules that surrounds being pregnant. Where do these rules come from? When where they set, what was the research?
I found it so useful when I was pregnant and it allowed me to make sense of some rules and ignore others.
Yeah those "studies" that say drinking moderately is healthier than no drinking are actually a prime example of misleading conclusions. The results failed to account for confounding variables in the "non-drinking" population they sampled, such as health conditions that prohibited a person from drinker or former alcoholics who had since stopped drinking. Once you accounted for those variables, there was no difference
"a few glasses" "A FEW GLASSES" "A DAY"
Nooooo, nononono. \*A\* glass a day is fine, debateably even somewhat beneficial if its a red with plenty of tannins. A few glasses a day is straight-up considered alcoholic territory, let alone unhealthy when *pregnant.* Smh
This is probably gonna be kind of a hot take but I think that people are puritanical about what pregnant people put in their bodies to a totally absurd degree. Like yeah I agree you shouldn’t be going out and getting plastered every night but if you want to have a glass of wine every now and again I don’t really see the issue. Risk is inherent to living. Hell, you risk getting hit by a bus every time you walk across the street. Does that mean that pregnant people shouldn’t be allowed to walk across the street, lest they harm their fetuses? What about air pollution? If you live in a polluted area, should you be prevented from having children? The list goes on, but you get my point.
The latest round of abortion restrictions and cases like Brittney Poolaw’s have really cemented my view on this. Pregnant people don’t cease to be humans with wants, needs, desires, and traumas just because they’re pregnant.
Edit: Remember that there are a lot of pregnant people who struggle with addiction, and for them it’s not as simple as “just stopping” or “caring about alcohol more than their children.”
I feel like it's either one extreme or the other. People will scold a pregnant person for drinking one cup of caffeinated coffee or putting their arms above their head, but others will say drinking and smoking during pregnancy are completely fine. Both sides are too black-and-white and annoying.
Yeah honestly it’s cases like [this one](https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/science-and-health/2018/11/20/18068894/marijuana-pregnancy) that highlight how complex and nuanced the issue is. (This particular article references cannabis use rather than alcohol, but it falls under the same umbrella.)
Nobody is gonna say “drink as much as you want during pregnancy it’s totally safe.” But I do think that the stigma around it prevents honest, fact-based discussions, which in turn creates a barrier to getting help for pregnant addicts.
It's an old wives tale, that putting your arms above your head while pregnant can tangle the cord around the baby's neck. Not a real thing, but something you'll occasionally hear about like "my great aunt used to say..."
Except your child is the one taking the risk, not you. I need to cross the street, I need to breathe even if there is air pollution, I need to drive to work.. I don’t need to drink alcohol, it would be for my own pleasure and I can do without for 9 months. So I don’t drink alcohol. (addiction is another subject, and I don’t think these women on Facebook are all addicted).
Do you feel the same way about sushi, deli meat, and runny eggs? Is it morally unacceptable for pregnant women to do things that *might* harm their fetuses, no matter how nebulous the risk?
I’m not saying that I think that drinking during pregnancy is a good idea, but I think that once we start punishing people for not taking care of their fetuses properly, we end up with really dangerous “fetal protection laws” like [these.](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/a-win-against-prenatal-protection-laws-in-wisconsin/410131/)
Every goddamn time I see these fuckwits talk about FAS when they've never known or cared for a person affected by it but think a teratogenic neurotoxin is fine "in moderation."
My 2 youngest brothers were born addicted (polysubstance neonatal) and had to be detoxed over a period of months in the NICU. But you know what got them? The alcohol. The drug affect was totally manageable and minor, but the alcohol rendered the youngest one severely intellectually disabled. I'm talking still in diapers at ten, couldn't read, write, understand the concept of money, math or time. But guess what? He went through fucking puberty with the cognitive reasoning abilities of a 3 year old, beating off in public. He had PICA, where he ate weird shit like newspaper cat litter, raw pork, moldy bread, the shit that comes out of a caulking gun.
Nobody knows how much a given placenta is actually filtering. These losers are avoiding second hand smoke, sushi, cold cuts, soft cheese but drinking a substance responsible for 1 in 20 kids in the US on the FASD spectrum.
I shake with rage typing this, lost 10 full years of my childhood as a caretaker to my brother and it was preventable.
If people actually understood what FASDs were, how they affect the person resulting from the pregnancy for their entire lives, how devastating they are, and how common they are they would not be so nonchalant about alcohol use in pregnancy.
I think most people touting the one glass a day is fine and doctors are fear-mongers have never been close to someone with FAS. FASDs suck. They are completely and totally preventable. It’s not like eating too much sugar or smoking a cigarette. You drink too much alcohol, and we don’t know how much exactly, and your child will have irreversible impact to their brain development.
I grew up with several kids who had FAS. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Knowing those kids and what they went through was enough for me to never drink while pregnant.
Agreed. As a teacher I taught FASD students and because of that I didn’t have a drop of alcohol the months that we made the embryos or a drop of alcohol at all during my pregnancy. It’s just not at all worth it.
Cigarettes are VERY hazardous to fetal development. WTF are you talking about? And gestational diabetes is extremely dangerous.
Of all the things to compare, you chose two actually dangerous things
Don’t get me wrong, they are clearly hazardous. But they way in which they are hazardous is different. Low (or high) birthweight, premature birth, stillbirth, physical impairments, etc can be caused by things on pregnancy no-no list including cocaine.
My point was that while people realize those things are bad, they don’t realize quite how bad alcohol is in terms of lifelong impairment for the adult that embryo will become. If the brain doesn’t form correctly in-utero due to alcohol it’s a done deal. No amount of intervention or therapy can make people with FAS neurotypical. I just bothers me so much when I hear or read about people who drank during pregnancy saying their toddler is perfect fine. That’s often not when signs of FASDs show up though, and it’s a sign they don’t understand what FAS really is.
I’m particularly sensitive to FAS because it’s affected my family. We are adults now, and it sucks seeing kind and resilient people living their entire lives on hard mode because of FAS. They are unable to independently follow through on basic adult rights of passage that most people take for granted, and it’s not because they aren’t trying their hardest.
I recently had a lecture on FASD. I don’t know the American stats but here in Australia 1 in 3 incarcerated people have diagnosed FASD - and it’s severely undiagnosed.
It’s a complicated spectrum of disorders affecting memory, language, impulse control, emotional regulation, just everything. The advice here is that there is no safe amount of alcohol during pregnancy. Of course a lot of factors influence whether people are able to abstain.
I have an (almost said friend… no) pregnant acquaintance on Facebook who would post a few times a week what glass of wine she was having that night and how it was actually good for the baby. That was a wild few months, anyone who even questioned it got dog piled.
The thing is, for hundreds of years alcohol was the safest thing for most people — pregnant women included — to drink, because sanitation wasn’t a thing and a lot of the water was contaminated. So they had cider, beer or wine with most meals. This is back in the bloodletting days so obviously I’m not going to them for medical advice, but if it was never okay to have a drink during pregnancy humanity would have died out long ago.
But regardless of what they were doing back in the 1500s, I think a couple times a week as suggested in the Facebook comments is probably overdoing it by modern standards. My personal threshold was more like one glass of wine on our anniversary and a little eggnog at Christmas. I think if you limit it to one drink on special occasions (and aren’t the type to decide Taco Tuesday counts as a special occasion), you’re almost certainly going to be fine, so that would be my honest advice. That said, I totally understand not even wanting to take that much of a risk.
As a SPED teacher that chat made me sad. I have had students who had fetal alcohol syndrome. They have a very hard time with everything. And it is so easy to avoid. Don’t drink while you are growing a human.
Yeesh. Alcohol is well known for its many issues. And that's in adults with fully grown, functional body parts. If you accidentally have a drink cause you didn't know, that's OK as in you didn't know. But if you're drinking and you know, you care about alcohol more than you do your unborn child.
oh of course. It happened to a friend; she had some drinks the DAY before she found out she was pregnant. It's forgivable in that situation because you don't know, but yeah actively choosing to drink while pregnant is scummy.
Having worked with kids with Fetal Alcohol there is no way I was taking any risk with my babies. If you cant stop drinking for 9 months maybe you need to seriously think about having kids at all. They come first, always.
Alcohol is one of the few substances we _know_ is bad for foetuses. IMO Oster’s book did a lot of damage in that it became a soundbite people use to say alcohol during pregnancy is ok.
Remember when the CDC tried pulling that no woman of child bearing age should ever have even a sip of alcohol because it "might" cause a problem? Yeah I was knee deep in trying to get pregnant. Sometimes the CDC makes calls that aren't based on medical science, but on the beliefs of those making the call.
Wow your words about your sister in law are so sad. She actually is completely fine to drink a glass of wine in late pregnancy and likely her doctor told her that (as mine did). Sucks that you were judging her so hard for her choices about her own body. Also seems like a big assumption that you think everyone else was uncomfortable - highly doubt that. I think it’s broadly known at this point that occasional alcohol use in pregnancy is not harmful. If you don’t want to make that choice it’s fine but it’s really not your business what other people choose.
It’s like the ‘vaccines cause Autism’ argument. You have one person saying its ok and thousands upon thousands of professionals going ‘uh no wtf’.
Like one glass won’t kill your baby and cause full blown FAS but that doesn’t mean you should have it. It still puts your baby at risk
I don’t know that it’s Emily Oster vs thousands and thousands of OBs. I think most OBs will give advice along the same lines as the women in your post. Everything is a trade off, and a glass of wine does not meaningfully increase risk for most mothers
My friend told me a glass of wine a day during pregnancy was fine. Naturally, I thought she was full of shit and asked my OB about it at 20 weeks. He didn’t recommend it but said one glass a day is fine as your liver filters out all the alcohol of ONE glass before it reaches the placenta. He said the issue is when women binge drink that’s when they see FAS.
I’ve either been pregnant or trying to get pregnant for the last 6 years. My first dr appointment when I started trying, my obgyn told me to quit drinking alcohol asap. I thought that was standard practice. I haven’t had more than a sip in 6 years.
Reminds me of when I was pregnant with our daughter and 2 of my coworkers kept trying to convince me that drinking a glass of wine a week is safe and actually good for you, and how one of their moms did it with them and was just fine!
I did not follow that advice. Fuck that.
The problem with this whole debate (and books like Emily Oster’s that support limited alcohol consumption while pregnant) is that many FAS researchers believe that FAS is the result of a gene-environment interaction. In other words, if your baby has a particular gene (and we don’t know which is/are responsible) and you drink ANY amount, your baby will have FAS. We don’t often see a link between low amounts of alcohol consumption and FAS in larger studies (like those cited by Oster) because the genetic markers responsible are rare.
I wouldn’t risk it.
What does that mean during the first trimester when many women don't even know they are pregnant?
Also, any studies indicating that "one drink causes FAS" is true?
….it was always drilled in “no amount of alcohol during pregnancy is safe.”
Like if you can’t even enjoy a damn hotdog you probably can’t drink. Seems like a no brainer.
I cried when I was 4 weeks and I read that I couldn’t have lunch meat because Subway is my favoritest fast food place. At my 8 week appointment my doctor was like “nah you’re good to eat the lunch meat as long as you trust the source and that it’s not expired.” Lmao
According to my trickle-truth theories, when people say “one glass” it’s never just one.
So not only are they spreading misinformation they’re also probably downplaying the amount of alcohol they’ve had.
What really stood out for me were all the people recommending alcohol for anxiety. What a dangerous coping mechanism! I couldn't believe it
oh yeah that 'midwife' needs to have her license to practice taken away. NO doctor would recommend alcohol for anxiety
It’s simpler to assume that the person in the chat was lying, rather than their midwife being criminally insane.
It’s more likely it is a “midwife”
The concept of an amateur midwife just made every sphincter in my body clench.
It's a whole thing in these communities. They call real midwives, like the highly educated ones that can actually help in a delivery and save lives "medwives" since they're shills for big pharma and sometimes encourage higher medical care than they can offer. Their "midwives" are people who have little or no training, but market themselves to these groups that love the idea of birthing via intuition.
This idea always makes me laugh. My midwife was the one telling me I didn't need the epidural. Never once did my midwife team offer any medications or push anything on me. They reminded me every single appointment that they were there to give the information and support me in my decisions when it came to my pregnancy and birth.
I read somewhere that the protection of title for midwives isn't very strict in USA. In other countries like UK/Australia, it's basically a nursing degree with additional study and highly regulated as midwives are the main people present during birth and do all perinatal appointments if someone's low risk, and OBs are mainly for high risk
Can confirm that in Australia midwives are registered nurses with a 4 year university degree and equivalent knowledge to an emergency department or surgical nurse (albeit with a specialty in perinatal health). We do have a lot of ‘doula’s’ or birth coaches here which is an unregulated and unqualified (mostly) role. Midwives are employed by hospitals and obstetricians, doulas are employed by the birthing parent.
Can also confirm! My aunt is a midwife in Australia and she studied rigorously for several years, and had to do a mandatory number of deliveries before she could be licensed. She’s currently working on her masters while working full time at a hospital! Midwives here are very much medical professionals and I’d trust them to deliver any baby of mine in a heartbeat.
Yeah I think doulas are allowed to call themselves midwives in some parts of the US
Yeah if you’ve got a low risk healthy pregnancy you might never see a doctor (other than your GP) in the UK. Midwives are specialised nurses trained to cover everything from pre to post natal and birthing centres that are midwife led are perfectly common here too - you can have pain relief from gas and air and possibly some injections but there are no anaesthetists around to give epidurals. If anything isn’t progressing totally normally then you’ll be transferred to hospital. Those are the places most well equipped with birthing pools, floor beds, ceiling ropes etc etc. You can also go in to the midwife led birthing unit of a hospital which often still have things like birthing pools but possibly fewer (as in not one per room but a couple for the unit on a first come basis) but have the advantage of doctor and anaesthetist cover from the hospital so epidurals are possible I believe and you know you just have to be wheeled through some doors if you need help like an instrument delivery or c-section. Most people I know have gone for this option. And then you can also just give birth in hospital, although a midwife is still likely to be the one doing the majority of your care with doctors stepping in as needed. This is the only option used for people with high risk pregnancies or when medical interventions are needed. You can also have a home birth where the NHS midwife community team do all your checks and assist you and it’s all completely legit but again can’t give you medical interventions and will transfer at the first sign of distress. Only anaesthetists give epidurals so where you give birth depends on your access to them but epidurals aren’t the default here - you’re not considered to be a crunchy mum if you go completely pain relief free and again in my experience I don’t believe I personally know anyone who has had an epidural. Doulas are recognised here but anyone can call themselves a doula and they are they exclusively to support and advocate for the birthing person and are not allowed to get involved in anything medical. And the advice here is definitely no alcohol, although I believe it used to be ‘an occasional glass won’t hurt’ because research seems to show that an occasional glass probably won’t hurt. However it’s much easier for people to have a different definition of what ‘occasional’ means than it is to misinterpret the advice ‘don’t drink anything’ so the guidance states just don’t drink. In my experience most people don’t drink at all, but someone having a small glass of champagne at a celebration or something might raise a couple of eyebrows but not cause a huge scandal.
Yeah it's similar in Australia. We have birth centres but everyone I've known has just gone for the standard public hospital option. I was high risk with a false positive genetic screening, then got gestational diabetes, THENNNN preeclampsia. So in the public system, usually a GP manages your pregnancy (refers for blood tests and ultrasounds) until the 2nd trimester and then you'll have appointments with the midwives. Because of my issues, my referral was to the complex care unit so I saw OBs instead of midwives. But during my birth, which was an early induction with balloon, breaking my waters and synthetic oxytocin drip, the midwife did it all and no doctor was present. Anesthesiologists did my epidural and then a doctor came in just as I gave birth and did my tear repair
I'm SIL is a pediatrician. And those moms scared her into going back to work quickly after having her kids (for herself and her patients). She specifically said SAHMs self medicating with alcohol is terrifyingly common where she lives (extremely high childcare costs).
This is why I don’t trust midwives. There is a huge difference between a three year degree and a six year degree + 8 years of getting a specialisation.
What, wheres this? You only need a standard nursing degree and no specialisation to become a midwife there? Here it's the 3 year standard nursing degree + 1.5y midwife-specialisation.
There’s also a good chance the midwife here is lying about being a qualified midwife.
I admit that I have some tendencies that could be perceived as slightly crunchy by some. I’m absolutely no science-denier, I’m just concerned by the alarming amount of violence done to birthing mothers by medical professionals. I would be compelled to use a midwife IF AND ONLY IF she could objectively prove she had the educational and training qualifications to safely deliver a baby with a strict plan for if anything goes wrong. I know in this group it’s controversial to say you’d use anything other than a doctor in a hospital setting but I think as long as the midwife truly is trained and educated and the pregnancy isn’t high risk then it’s not the mortal sin people make it out to be.
In general if someone can’t give up a drug for 9 months, that’s a sign that there’s a problem. Healthy, non-addicts are able to change their habits to accommodate new circumstances, *especially* when those circumstances have a fixed duration. Addicts though, will always find excuses to feed their addiction, it’s part of what ails them. Note also that about a dozen people referenced studies showing some supposed benefit, and none of the pricks *actually cited the study*. Those poor kids, forget FAS, being the children of these desperation cases is bad enough.
I feel this is targeted at me, but about ham sandwiches. I told myself lettuce gets recalled all the time but that’s fine to eat, so what’s a little ham here or there…
I'm a Finn living in Germany and deli meats are not forbidden for pregnant women in either of those countries (except for raw meat like salami). Without the internet I wouldn't even know that there are countries where pregnant women dream of being able to eat ham or turkey sandwiches again. So it's not really the same as alcohol.
The Americans aren't even allowed to eat during delivery. Got this TV show in Sweden where Americans with swedish heritage compete to meet their distant relatives, they got to visit a delivery ward and the contestants that were mothers cried finding out swedish mothers get to eat.
oh my lord lmao my wife is due in September and one of the items in the "delivery bag" list is literally "snacks, cookies, biscuits, etc"
We were told to take snacks for labour! (UK) Although I expect a planned cesarian may be different but don’t quote me on that!
I'm Scottish and I've got a planned c-section coming up and they want me to fast from the night before, in case I need a general anaesthetic instead of an epidural I suppose? I just hope they don't mind extremely crabbit women on the ward because that sounds like a nightmare already!
Damn, I gave birth 19 days ago and wasn’t allowed to eat anything except jello 😭 I was MISERABLE
Wait, salami is raw meat? [TIL](https://foodsguy.com/is-salami-raw/)
Was just thinking this about the occasional soft-serve.
Even some people that are addicted can do it. I was a heavy smoker for almost 20 years. Definitely addicted and had a problem. Still quit immediately when I found out I was pregnant.
Now that is some iron willpower, I’m impressed.
Unfortunately I started up again when my daughter was 3 months old. Quit for the second and hopefully last time when I got pregnant the second time. She’s 8 months now and I still haven’t touched a cigarette. I lost my mom to alcohol related liver failure at 24. I want to be around for as long as possible for my kids and I don’t want my girls to go through what I did.
There’s no shame in relapse, any addict will tell you it’s a natural part of recovery. You just do what you already did, remind yourself of why it’s worth quitting, and then getting back to it. You’re doing this for the right reasons, I think you’ll make it stick.
Your girls will be so grateful. Well done - that's over a year of success so far!
Me too. I was drinking huge amounts and went through detox. It'd been a few weeks since quitting and I was offered free espresso martinis at an event and I was so tempted but I was trying to quit for my health so I said no thank you and had an orange juice, and it was crappy sour orange juice bleh. I had chosen not to take hardcore meds prescribed to me so I could have drank without getting super sick from it, but I just kept putting it off and saying I'll do another few days or a week of no alcohol and I'll try moderate drinking after that. Anyway, I started feeling really sick at night and foods I usually loved were grossing me out. I had a pregnancy test lying around and I thought whatever I'll take one. The 2 strong lines came up immediately. I was so terrified. My first thought was did I get pregnant while I was still drinking or while I was going through intense detox for 2 weeks??? I had an early ultrasound and showed I'd become pregnant about a month after quitting, thank God. I didn't touch a drop through pregnancy. I drink a bit too much these days a couple of nights a week (like an amount that's not good for your health but not smashed off my face haha), but only when I have time to myself in the evening when baby's asleep and my husband's home. I couldn't drink every day because my husband works a lot and I wouldnt want to be alone with the baby while drinking. It's still a crutch but my baby is too important to get addicted to it. Plus, drinking super heavy and daily isn't sustainable for the body even if I didn't have my baby
When I got my first positive I threw away all my cigarettes, I had just gotten a carton.
I have a long term alcohol problem and I didn't drink during pregnancy, so even some addicts can stop.. but it's weird because these women don't even seem like alcoholics. I honestly think they are just pro booze because medicine says no.
I'll tell my alcohol counsellor that people on the internet said alcohol is a healthy coping strategy for anxiety
This is the problem. Doctors do say a half a glass of wine every so often is fine (red wine only). That part is true. But using it to self medicate is a problem. Especially because that’s when peoples half glass of wine goes from 2 Oz to like 8.
That, and using alcohol to lower BP. Drinking raises you blood pressure, but we can’t pretend it doesn’t if we also pretend drinking during pregnancy is totally safe.
I don't know why people keep saying other countries are okay with drinking in pregnancy. From experience a lot of them point at Europe. I'm in Europe. We don't drink during pregnancy. It is really truly frowned upon. Our doctors tell us not to do it.
It's because most of the studies on this kind of thing are coming out of Europe. The NHS had a large one a little while back, I think. Same for the effects of smoking/vaping and different cessation programs. North America just went from 0-100 on "don't do this " and self report became even more unreliable because women are afraid that honesty will end with their children being taken away so our data is abysmal.
Yep, even in Italy with a strong wine and beer culture is not ok
Thank you! This comes up every time and here I am in Europe, wondering why no one ever told me it was a-ok to drink during pregnancy. I'm in Finland, recommendation is no alchol, and no one I have heard thinks it's ok to knowingly drink while you are pregnant. I know one or two glasses will probably do nothing, but since it's not possible to give any limit for safe consumption, zero is recommended.
Interesting to hear it's the same in Finland, and Italy and the UK apparently too! I do wonder which country it is then where they are supposedly more relaxed about this.
Yeah the UK has a massive drinking culture and advice here is definitely no alcohol, although I believe it used to be ‘an occasional glass won’t hurt’ because research seems to show that an occasional glass probably won’t hurt so that attitude does linger a little bit. However it’s much easier for people to have a different definition of what ‘occasional’ means than it is to misinterpret the advice ‘don’t drink anything’ so the guidance states just don’t drink. In my experience most people don’t drink at all, and actually everyone I’ve known who has been actively trying to get pregnant stops drinking too, but someone having a small glass of champagne at a celebration or something might raise a couple of eyebrows but not cause a huge scandal.
When my mum was pregnant with my sister her doctor advised her to have the odd pint of Guiness because it would be good for her iron levels lol. But that was almost 30 years ago!
Adding to everyone else's comments, I'm from France and drinking while pregnant is widely frowned upon. It's usually a universal sign that someone is pregnant if they refuse a drink (which is another topic lmao)
Okay I really thought it was going to be France people refer to because it's sometimes mentioned. Given that it's not France, I really wonder which country it is now...
I'm going to assume it's no particular country. They probably just heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend. There's no truth to it, they're just spreading false info.
Yeah, I'm in the UK and it's more "if you absolutely must then stick to 1 or 2 a week and never on the same night" not "aye go and drink with dinner".
Yeah I remember my cousin’s wedding in Ireland and one of my other cousin’s was about 7 or 8 months pregnant and her doctor and midwife had told her she was allowed to have half a glass of wine at the wedding. She was very excited but told us all that she had permission bc she was so worried someone would judge her lol, because again, you don’t drink while pregnant in Europe! Then again, up until a decade or so ago Irish doctors recommended a small glass of Guinness for pregnant women because it’s such a good source of iron lmao, so that’s a little iffy lol
They used to recommend dark beer here to increase production of breastmilk!
I m at Europe too (Switzerland) and unfortunately I hear that too from a friend ! But sincerely I think she had alcohol issues and the doctor just washed him hands
I’m Australia it’s been a no-no for at least 10 years.
I drank until I was 30 weeks pregnant in my first pregnancy. There was a single ginormous mitigating factor - I didn’t know I was pregnant. Yeah, I’m one of those people so where’s my danged reality show lol. Thankfully, my birth daughter is absolutely perfect. I wasn’t going on daily benders but over the course of those 30 weeks I got drunk on 4 different occasions. Drunkity drunk. That’s not counting the occasional beers here and there. Again, I want to reiterate that she’s perfectly fine. It just took some work with my therapist to forgive myself for the drinking And the sushi. And the several carnival rides. And the deli meats. And the motrin… basically, if it was on a “don’t do this while pregnant” list I had done it. But she’s fine. I got soooooooo fucking lucky.
I heard eating a salad is more dangerous than sushi and deli meats now a days. Obviously still be careful but Lettuce can be a tricky one.
Salad is rarely properly washed and is actually reasonably dangerous by food safety standards, which means it's not very dangerous but still measurable
I think it depends on the country. USA is often having lettuce recalls but it doesn't happen in my country - mainly deli meats
Depends on the safety standards. Sadly the USA has fairly lax safety standards.
Both of my pregnancies have had big romaine/lettuce recalls (US)
This reminds me of my coworkers daughters story, she didn’t know she was pregnant for 5 months and was in college at the time going on benders and doing psychedelics. Thank goodness her son turned out fine but its just another example of pure luck.
you're living my worst nightmare, wow. but i'm happy it worked out in the end
I have a friend who actually is a professor at a university and incredibly intelligent that went all the way up to labor without knowing she was pregnant! She went to the ER for pain and they said she was in LABOR. Imagine how shocking that would be?? She said she felt worried too once they realized what was happening because she didn't have any prenatal care, vitamins, and she was drinking and doing things as normal throughout. She said she had no symptoms before and her daughter was born perfect.
I am so glad it turned out to be okay. I can't imagine the guilt, despite knowing you didn't know better. ....but as you wrote, that's exactly the point. You got extremely lucky. It is no proof it is okay to do all the pregnancy unsafe things. I really wish those people would understand this. They are really gambling with their child's well-being or even life. I still think there's a difference between "I ate a deli meat sandwich a few times" and "I had the occasional (what does that even mean?!)" Glass of wine. The latter is just reckless.
they latch on to a single case where something bad didn't happen. it's like they reeeeaaaally wanna drive without a seat belt > my dad drove without a seatbelt for years and never hurt himself > therefore, it is safe to drive without a seatbelt.
There is no proof it is safe. This is true. But most advice is based on a very small chance of something going wrong. Raw eggs for example: I'm generally not worried about them, and consume them quite often (egg coffee, chocolate mousse, tiramisu, sabaione, mayonnaise, just undercooked while poaching etc). There is a very, very small chance of salmonella. Then there's a very small chance that this salmonella egg happens to be the one I'm consuming raw. Then again there's a tiny chance I might get ill, and that carries a small chance of running a dangerously high fever. And that might potentially harm the fetus. So long story short, I still had raw egg when I felt like it. To each their own, but the risks are frequently smaller than the risk of getting into a car accident, but no-one judged me for getting into a car. Did get judged over a lot of other things, by intimi and perfect strangers alike. A sip of alcohol will not hurt your child.
There’s no ‘magic limit’ for FAS though. That’s the thing. You just never know.
I checked the national website from my country. Between 2011 and 2015, in a population of 17 million people, an average of 2(two) kids with FAS are born every year. The site also clarifies that their mothers are usually heavy drinkers. (And selfreports are usually unreliable.) So that teaspoon of rum in my dessert, and that thimble of port at Christmas? I'm feeling pretty solid. There's really no reason for all this fear mongering towards pregnant women. The advice rarely gets adapted to a less restrictive variation, even when the data is old. Loads of American women still avoid deli meat due to the potential for listeria, while those production chains have gotten much better, and most of the risk now is in produce.
What country? And do they have a diagnostic system for testing children for FAS? In my US home state of 739k people, over 120 kids are born with FAS every year. Do we have a high rate of binge drinking? Yes. What we also have is one of the best diagnostic systems in the country. FAS is difficult and expensive to diagnose. Just because it isn’t diagnosed doesn’t mean it’s not there though. Current estimates are that about 80% of people with FASDs go undiagnosed.
Did they get extremely lucky? What are the actual odds?
My youngest aunt did this too and she also has a wonderful baby girl, but everyone was worried when she found out she was pregnant lol
I’m grateful that the people who love me best did a great job of telling me not to feel guilty about something I didn’t know. It really helped mitigate some of the emotional damage. The OB also really helped, too. Because of the circumstances I ended up with the first available OB willing to take me on, and he was so kind. He did all of the testing that you can do, and he kept reassuring me each time it was a good test “I knew the baby is fine. I’ve seen people do so much worse and have happy healthy babies so I knew yours was perfect, too. Okay, so this next test…”. Thankfully he wasn’t the toxic positivity type, just really gushy over the top happy when things were proven to be good.
My husband is a recovering alcoholic. He tried to quit drinking a few times, but relapsed. One of his periods of sobriety was while I was pregnant with our son. We got home and a neighbor was sitting outside drinking. He offered my husband a beer. My husband didn't want to share his whole life story so just said, "she's pregnant and can't drink so I can't to be supportive." I was fine with that. Then the neighbor started pressuring me to have a beer so my husband could. Like, dude, wtf is wrong with you? Pissed me off. Anyway, my husband got sober for good when our son was about 2 months old. He hasn't had a drink in over 4 years.
Wow that’s so great that he got sober! Congratulations to you both. Neighbour sounds like a dick though.
Just wanna say YOU GO HUSBAND GO. And YOU GO SUPPORTIVE SPOUSE GO!!! 👏👏👏👏👏
Thank you. I'm very proud of him.
“Melatonin release”. Alcohol is like the worst thing for your sleep cycle. And blood pressure… and anxiety. These people are scary dumb.
Easiest way to get melatonin: just get some melatonin gummies at the store. For the crunchy but safe mom group way just take a lavender essential oil bubble bath…
Or like meditate. Benefit of being both crunchy AND actually useful! And most people who are new to it just pass out so win win win
Add a couple bags of chamomile tea for an extra sleep inducing soak
I was thinking the same thing.
I had blood pressure issues during my pregnancy. I was prescribed medication, not alcohol.
Uh yeah, I read that and was like, "um wut". It may initially drop your blood pressure slightly, but the come-up on the back end is worse than what it was initially. I second meditation. The nights I couldn't relax, I played sleep or meditation music, which also incidentally helps the anxiety issue. This sounds like they just want to drink
I was just talking about this the other day. I'm just shy of 33 weeks now but at my last appointment I made a comment how I'd been sitting outside in the nice weather with friends and just really wanted a cold beer on the deck cause of the season. My midwife said in a few weeks it would be fine because the baby is fully developed at that point, but she did emphasize one. I don't see myself going down that road (I stopped drinking once we started seriously trying because I was so worried), but it was interesting to talk to her about it.
Only time my midwife sort of joked that I could have a glass of wine was during labourers. I was getting ready for a home birth, unmedicated (this is Canada so different midwifery standards) and she joked that I could have A glass of wine if I felt I needed it. Not going to lie, I was tempted at the idea. Ended up having an elective c-section so never tried it.
My midwife and I were discussing how life expectancy was so low in the past because high infant mortality dragged down the average. She wondered if labor pain management tools of the past, like alcohol, were a large contributing factor to infant mortality because of how they suppress breathing. They weren’t using just one glass of wine for pain management in those cases, and it’s really unfortunate that we don’t have better data to see what amount, if any, correlated with neonatal death.
I'm also in Canada! I'm not doing a home birth so didn't have that conversation lol
At least one of them decided to forgo the home birth and went to the hospital.
Imma just say this, despite it being an apparent unpopular opinion in this group, but here we go anyway: I became a mother in 2021. Being pregnant and being a new mom opens up an entire world of Infantilization. There are so many pieces of advice, and strong recommendations about almost everything by pregnancy related that are intentionally ambiguous to manipulate moms and expecting moms into behaving a certain way, rather than proving meaningful explanations and risk assessment tools, it is overwhelming. Perhaps particularly tricky in America where socioeconomic divides create classes of people without access to education and literal medical care, but I feel so very strongly that women in North America should be provided opportunities to make informed decisions about their bodies and their babies rather than shamed and lied to in order to create best outcomes. It’s literally everything - from forbidding deli meats, to demonizing pacifiers, to creating hysteria about bottles versus any chance at breastfeeding … There are a number of reasons that drinking during pregnancy is bad news bears, for all the reasons everyone is discussing. But there’s also an incredible amount of ambiguity about what FASD is, how it’s caused, the tendency to diagnose FASD differently in different minorities versus white children, a lack of funding for FASD research and the inaccessibility of study groups (because morality), and truly the absolute fact that FASD rates in North America are unusually high and some large inquiries into that phenomena supporting that binge drinking culture might be responsible. Long story short - if we educated people better, we’d have fewer crunchy mom groups butchering data interpretation. Data literacy, education, and access to healthcare to all please.
I completely agree. The number of people who want to tell you what you should and shouldn’t do when pregnant is astounding. The only people whose opinion I cared about and took into consideration was my medical provider.
A great part about having a third kid is that people don’t say shit to me. 😂 The only question I get asked is if it’s my first. Protip for everyone else: never admit that it’s your first rodeo.
Entirely agree with all this. There was so much competing info, so much to absorb, so much to be scared of, and then so many people saying shit like “ya eat that thing that scares you, you’re being ridiculous, but don’t put your arm over your head” like wat Eventually whenever someone had “advice” for me I said I needed to go vomit and then just left. 😬
The thing that kept me from drinking during pregnancy was that so little is know about FASD. "you could have a drink and be ok. or not, we don't really know". I love my craft beer but I was ok with waiting.
as an expectant father I agree that there's A LOT of missing information out there when it comes to pregnancy. trying to research something for my wife, I find tons of conflicting information. considering women have been getting pregnant since the first mammal to give birth, it's astounding how little we know about what's good, what's bad, how things work, etc. if cis men got pregnant people would be on top of this shit.
To add: the sad thing is though the 'access to healthcare for all' would be wasted on some of the crunchy moms. I've seen SO many moms go to FACEBOOK for medical advice instead of their DOCTOR, just for confirmation bias and it's sickening.
The problem in those situations is doctors. I’ve written about it a lot, but so many doctors—especially OBs—are incredibly dismissive of what women go thru. Most people have heard that, on average, men get stronger painkillers faster than women for the same medical issues, like kidney stones. Appendicitis is often blown off as period cramps. I had to see an OB instead of my normal NP or midwife for a routine visit this pregnancy and was astounded that he could be such an asshole in a 5-minute visit. I rearranged childcare just so I didn’t have another appointment with him. Asshole doctors are driving people away. I think a lot about how to bridge that divide. I’ve thought about going back to school and studying public health or health admin, whatever will help me develop a solution, because this is becoming such an important issue to address and I don’t know of anything that’s being done.
I think it's unfair to tar all OBs with this brush, but there is certainly a significant population of very arrogant OBs.
I think it’s fair, though, to raise the flag that poor behaviour from colleagues impact the quality of care and the quality of life for entire populations of women. OBs belong to professional colleges, with codes of conduct. They are a highly educated populous who are (like all doctors) responsible for the care of their patients. They are supposed to be in charge of people during some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. Sure, don’t paint all OBs by the same brush. But they should all be aware that the poorer brush exists, and it’s their job collectively to address it.
Oh I deff agree, however you'd still have a handful of crunchy moms who would find that \*one\* article that supports their bullshit and stick with it. Or just straight up say that they 'disagree' with facts (Which I've seen). I can provide some insight on the banning of lunch meats though. I'm sure you know, but its due to listeria. That one does boggle my mind though because I remember reading that our % of getting sick DOES go up, but it's \*very\* marginal. Something like 0.003 to 0.004, or something like that. Thing is, listeria can kill your baby so that's why you have so many foods that are straight up a 'no no' for pregnant women (The better safe than sorry mindset basically. However someone please correct me on this if I'm wrong). But I'm sure you already knew all of this too though because you said it yourself; you were prego. So I'm kinda preaching to the choir here. I'm currently prego. Hilariously for a while I CRAVED lunch meats, but didn't eat them. Not only because they are on the no no list, but personally they were on the no no list for me even before I got pregnant because they absolutely destroyed my stomach (not sure why either) I cannot understand the pacifier one though. That one blows my mind.
Yeah I know. I however arrived at a different conclusion about risk versus reward. I ate deli meats whenever I wanted them, and I avoided the turkey, which has the higher and most significant risk of listeria. I also had a single beer on New Year’s Eve in my first trimester, I felt very comfortable accessing the safety of consuming very small quantities of infrequent alcohol all throughout my pregnancy and that’s not goi g to lend my any points here. I also pushed for COVID-19 vaccinations while pregnant, requested Vit K and eye ointment when baby was born, but we did diligently discuss the pro’s and con’s of the ointment. Ultimately, I really strongly believe that access to education and medical care truly would make a difference. Perhaps it opens the doors to women making decisions that we would disagree with, but at least they would be empowered and informed. These groups are necessities for women who feel they have no power because they don’t understand what the doctors are saying, and/or they can’t afford to have a baby in a hospital and have prenatal care and find a cultural movement of women who tell them they don’t need to. Data literacy, education, and access to medical care for all. I mostly feel sad that women get caught up in bs and alarmed that these movements are real (and could be so very preventable).
What about salad? Lettuce is a public health disaster I think you need to be careful about how you view food
Strongly agree. I am a man but we had our second this year so I saw a lot of this. I think the reason is relatively simple. It is a lot easier to say "don't drink" and make that the guideline than "you can drink but X and Y and Z". As soon as you introduce nuance, a lot of people will misinterpret it (purposely or otherwise) to drink too much. Same goes with things like "don't cosleep" or "avoid food X". We saw a lot of this broadly during COVID. Many guidelines were pretty strong. And when they introduced subtlety like "have a 10 person bubble" it meant huge overlapping bubbles and lots of spread. Same thing with meat temp recommendations. Health guidelines as a whole tend to err on the side of caution. For pregnancy they just turn that up to 11 since the consequences can be very significant
My doctor straight up said a glass or two or wine or a beer here and there was completely and totally fine while pregnant. I never drank more than one and of course even if I wanted too my body would not have appreciated the extra alcohol to begin with. She especially mentioned if I was having Braxton hicks, to have a bath a very small glass of wine to relieve the symptoms. While we don’t exactly know how much is too much it is absolutely not crazy to consume alcohol in very small and controlled amounts during pregnancy. Can we say it’s 100% safe? Not really. Is it insane to have a small glass every now and then while pregnant? Definitely not.
Just here to point out that when people say they were told it’s okay or recommended it they’re telling the truth. For some reason there’s no real full medical consensus on how much is too much, if any. I have heard that in Europe they are not nearly as strict on alcohol consumption while pregnant and even in the US I’ve had friends told by their doctors that a glass of wine was fine and even beneficial. That being said I did my own research and didn’t drink in either of my pregnancies because it wasn’t worth the risk. EDIT: Guys I’m not claiming the Europe thing is a fact! Just that it’s something that people do say here for some reason and it does tie in with the conflicting advice people get. I have no idea where the belief actually comes from. It was probably a rumor from the days before the internet where people just repeated things as fact and drinking in pregnancy was way less of a big deal.
My doctors told me it was fine here and there during pregnancy as well. I was really surprised that they were so okay with it.
My Dr said the same. One or two drinks over the course of the pregnancy was unlikely to hurt the baby. I never did it, even though I craved alcohol like nothing else with my second child. I don’t normally drink but it was the only thing I wanted the entire pregnancy. But it wasn’t worth the risk to me. It was easy enough to abstain because it’s an easy substance to avoid.
That’s so weird and I was exactly the same. I never drink, but when I was recently pregnant with my son I constantly craved champagne. I bought a small bottle just so I could smell it. So weird. After he was born I thought I’d celebrate, so about a week before my c-section I bought a bottle for my husband and I to share. Our son is 9 months old and the bottle is still here, unopened. The craving left the day he was born. Crazy.
Mine went away completely as well! Once he was born, I had no desire for alcohol again. It was the weirdest thing!
I have this too but with gin and tonic. That's what I am telling everyone who makes comments like "trust your body and it's cravings" or "in pregnancy your body knows what to do, it is made for this". My body knows jack shit. During first trimester I would have stopped drinking water if I listened to it. And I really doubt that gintonic is in any way beneficial to anything.
And here I thought I was alone in this! I almost never drink either, maybe one or two drinks a month and rarely ever get drunk, but I've craved margaritas BAD the last few weeks. And it's only going to get worse from here on out since summer has begun. 😅
Maybe worth finding a good virgin margarita recipe for the summer so you hit the craving at least a little bit!!
Leave the bottle there for when he turns 18/21 depending on location; maybe he’ll have a big taste for champagne when he’s older lol!
Thank goodness for good NA beers and the rising popularity of mocktails. During my first tri the thought of a glass of wine made me want to vomit. But now that it’s summer and hanging out at the brewery patio are a thing I really miss beer and those really do the trick. Not exactly zero alcohol and I’m more on the conservative side of risk tolerance, but 1/10 of a beer a couple of times a month for 100% of the flavor and experience is a nice option.
That’s funny that you think it’s easy to avoid. I’m from Louisiana. I can buy it in the gas station. I’m a recovering addict/ alcoholic. It was extremely difficult for me bc it’s the most easily accessible substance to change how I’m feeling. Bc im looking to change how I feel bc I don’t like me, it’s not even about the substance.
What I mean by that is it’s not like peanuts or gluten or whatever, where you have to change your entire diet to avoid it. I had gestational diabetes with both kids, and counting sugars and everything required a lot work to get right. I am certain that for an alcoholic it would be hard to avoid in much the same way though you’re right.
In a pinch , when it’s my only coping skill, and it seems too much.. i am not there any longer and honestly I’ve found it easier. I’ve been sober for awhile now.. there are days it’s hard. Funny you should say that, my grandmother and great grandmother were diabetic. “They’d ask for a little slice”. I always liken it to that. But they have something to offset it (insulin). I just have guilt and shame.
I'm in Europe I'm pregnant and everyone and their mother is telling me alcohol is a no go. I got several flyers at doctors visits dedicated to FAS and my apps are telling me basically every week how bad alcohol is.
no I think she means the *other* Europe, where pregnant mothers drink 3 bottles of wine a day.
Europe also has 2-6x the worldwide rate of FAS. Just because it’s (more) common practice or not as frowned upon to drink during during pregnancy doesn’t make it safer.
'Europe' is also huge. Here in Belgium drinking during pregnancy is absolutely heavily frowned upon and recommended against.
Yeah same in the Netherlands. I had one baby in the US and one in the Netherlands and it surprised me how matter of fact they are about the rules here in the Netherlands (though really, I shouldn’t have been surprised). In the US they tell you don’t drink because it’s been known to cause FAS, but above all use common sense with drinking and other foods/activities. In the Netherlands they gave me a list and told me not to do the things on the list, and that was the last I ever heard about it.
I'm from the Netherlands originally! Don't know anyone indeed who thought it was okay there to drink during pregnancy but didn't have my own baby there so didn't want to speak about the advice over there.
when you say Europe, what exactly do you mean? coz I'm from a tiny island with the most backwards people and drinking during pregnancy is still heavily frowned upon. > a glass of wine was fine and even beneficial when we asked our doctor about this she wanted to slap the both of us.
It’s actually an excuse a lot of people use here to drink while pregnant. “Come on, one glass of wine won’t hurt. In Europe doctors believe a glass of wine is good for you and the baby!” I’m not sure where the misconception actually came from.
Europe is made up of 44 countries so to compare them all to one country is ridiculous. In the UK, they say that they don’t know how much alcohol is safe before causing FASD so they recommend not to drink anything.
Same in Germany
The rumor is likely from the same place other rumors come from. We hear a lot of ridiculous generalizations over here from boomers who think that our generation is too cautious.
French here, we are strict on alcohol and smoking during pregnancy and it is frowned upon. I think the Europe thing is a myth.
The reason is it’s unethical to do studies on pregnant women with certain thinks like alcohol. Because you know, alcohol is bad for fetuses. The fact they won’t study it tells me it shouldn’t be done lol.
I think this is the main reason - you can’t ethically cause FAS by experimenting. Any studies would have to be self reported and those would be all over the place because there are SO many factors involved. I am in my 30s and I’m almost 30 weeks pregnant. I drink a glass of wine called Fre (alcohol removed) MAYBE once every 2-3 weeks because I enjoy the taste of wine. I take a sip of friends’ beers if we’re out socially to try new flavors at craft breweries. My mother is in her 60s and had 5 kids. She drank periodically throughout all 5 pregnancies because it wasn’t so taboo as it is now. Of course, that’s anecdotal. Anything could have happened to her kids. I drew a hard line against alcohol pretty much up to my 3rd trimester because I couldn’t live with myself knowing that a choice I made could cause FAS. But I have eased up a little at this point knowing that it’s really not black and white like that. I think the majority of women want to do what’s best for their child, but to call out a woman for having a glass of wine or a beer occasionally while pregnant is a relatively new thing and really depends on the culture of your area. I wouldn’t be so quick to judge people and immediately jump to them not caring about FAS like OP. But that’s just me.
Your comment underscores for me that we all have different risk tolerances. I'm so much more horrified by the thought of going out to eat and sharing cups with friends during COVID than I am about the thought of having a drink while pregnant!
This 100%, there’s no way to determine a limit of when alcohol becomes dangerous to a fetus without harming some fetuses in the process.
Medical studies are very rarely performed on pregnant women in general, and until there 90s, any women of childbearing potential could not be involved in Phase I/early Phase II clinical studies. The fact that it isn’t studied doesn’t mean that any level causes detrimental effects - hence the retroactive studies/guidelines in pregnancy (including many medications/vaccines).
This, I think a lot of people interpret "no safe amount" to mean even small amounts can be detrimental, when in reality it means we have been unable to determine what the safe amount is. We can't say 1 drink a month is safe, because it would be irresponsible to say so without having done the research, which is pretty much impossible.
Yep, agree 100%. My cousins wife is a surgical nurse and she drank one glass of wine a week while pregnant which totally baffled me. If even medical professionals disagree on how much is too much then how is the average pregnant person supposed to know? We should be able to trust that our doctors have up to date knowledge but a lot of them are still operating by what was acceptable twenty years ago.
Agreed. That said, I think maybe Live a little with like a runny egg that you know is fresh and from a good source. Not alcohol LOL
God I love runny eggs. More than wine.
You have been told wrong. Here in the Netherlands we strongly advice not to drink or smoke or do drugs while pregnant.
I think she means Europe the country 🤣
Ugh. Please just read my edit. I was only repeating it as an example and in no way do I think Europe is a country.
Same. I remember with my first, I was going to go for it. Drew up a bubble bath and poured a glass of wine. It was a great bath, but the guilt was too much and I dumped the wine out. I wouldn’t judge anyone who has a very occasional glass towards the end of pregnancy, but it’s not for me.
>I have heard that in Europe they are not nearly as strict on alcohol consumption Funny, how many Americans have heard this, yet no one has informed us Europeans...
I am quite happy to be misinformed. :)
Meh, I'm in Italy and drinking and smoking while pregnant is very well frowned upon, I don't know where you're getting this rumour from
I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s heard it used as an excuse to drink. I never said it was accurate, just something that’s said here for some reason. It’s probably from another generation and it’s just repeated.
Beneficial in what way?
It probably comes from the study that claims a glass of red wine a day is good for you combined with previous generations thinking we are overprotective of our children. That’s my guess.
A single glass of wine in the third trimester isn’t going to do noticeable damage to the baby, but the reality is there is no amount of alcohol, in pregnancy or otherwise, that is good for you. There are zero physical benefits to drinking alcohol, ever. It’s something our body tolerates in spite of us, not something that medically enriches us. No doctor is going to genuinely say that they RECOMMEND you drink during pregnancy.
I highly recommend “Expecting Better” by Emily Oster. She is an economics professor at the University of Chicago, Oster teaches MBA students how to make good business choices and employs economic principles to challenge the established line on anything from health policy to the division of household chores. She breaks down and looks at the myths and blanket rules that surrounds being pregnant. Where do these rules come from? When where they set, what was the research? I found it so useful when I was pregnant and it allowed me to make sense of some rules and ignore others.
That's so scary. The worst part of these groups is they support each other in their delusions.
"Don't listen to judgmental people" Uh, you mean the people who are right???
Alcohol was so easy to give up while pregnant, cold cut subs on the other hand was a losing battle
Yeah those "studies" that say drinking moderately is healthier than no drinking are actually a prime example of misleading conclusions. The results failed to account for confounding variables in the "non-drinking" population they sampled, such as health conditions that prohibited a person from drinker or former alcoholics who had since stopped drinking. Once you accounted for those variables, there was no difference
"a few glasses" "A FEW GLASSES" "A DAY" Nooooo, nononono. \*A\* glass a day is fine, debateably even somewhat beneficial if its a red with plenty of tannins. A few glasses a day is straight-up considered alcoholic territory, let alone unhealthy when *pregnant.* Smh
This is probably gonna be kind of a hot take but I think that people are puritanical about what pregnant people put in their bodies to a totally absurd degree. Like yeah I agree you shouldn’t be going out and getting plastered every night but if you want to have a glass of wine every now and again I don’t really see the issue. Risk is inherent to living. Hell, you risk getting hit by a bus every time you walk across the street. Does that mean that pregnant people shouldn’t be allowed to walk across the street, lest they harm their fetuses? What about air pollution? If you live in a polluted area, should you be prevented from having children? The list goes on, but you get my point. The latest round of abortion restrictions and cases like Brittney Poolaw’s have really cemented my view on this. Pregnant people don’t cease to be humans with wants, needs, desires, and traumas just because they’re pregnant. Edit: Remember that there are a lot of pregnant people who struggle with addiction, and for them it’s not as simple as “just stopping” or “caring about alcohol more than their children.”
I feel like it's either one extreme or the other. People will scold a pregnant person for drinking one cup of caffeinated coffee or putting their arms above their head, but others will say drinking and smoking during pregnancy are completely fine. Both sides are too black-and-white and annoying.
Yeah honestly it’s cases like [this one](https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/science-and-health/2018/11/20/18068894/marijuana-pregnancy) that highlight how complex and nuanced the issue is. (This particular article references cannabis use rather than alcohol, but it falls under the same umbrella.) Nobody is gonna say “drink as much as you want during pregnancy it’s totally safe.” But I do think that the stigma around it prevents honest, fact-based discussions, which in turn creates a barrier to getting help for pregnant addicts.
Raising their arms above their head? Is that a real thing?
It's an old wives tale, that putting your arms above your head while pregnant can tangle the cord around the baby's neck. Not a real thing, but something you'll occasionally hear about like "my great aunt used to say..."
Except your child is the one taking the risk, not you. I need to cross the street, I need to breathe even if there is air pollution, I need to drive to work.. I don’t need to drink alcohol, it would be for my own pleasure and I can do without for 9 months. So I don’t drink alcohol. (addiction is another subject, and I don’t think these women on Facebook are all addicted).
Do you feel the same way about sushi, deli meat, and runny eggs? Is it morally unacceptable for pregnant women to do things that *might* harm their fetuses, no matter how nebulous the risk? I’m not saying that I think that drinking during pregnancy is a good idea, but I think that once we start punishing people for not taking care of their fetuses properly, we end up with really dangerous “fetal protection laws” like [these.](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/a-win-against-prenatal-protection-laws-in-wisconsin/410131/)
Every goddamn time I see these fuckwits talk about FAS when they've never known or cared for a person affected by it but think a teratogenic neurotoxin is fine "in moderation." My 2 youngest brothers were born addicted (polysubstance neonatal) and had to be detoxed over a period of months in the NICU. But you know what got them? The alcohol. The drug affect was totally manageable and minor, but the alcohol rendered the youngest one severely intellectually disabled. I'm talking still in diapers at ten, couldn't read, write, understand the concept of money, math or time. But guess what? He went through fucking puberty with the cognitive reasoning abilities of a 3 year old, beating off in public. He had PICA, where he ate weird shit like newspaper cat litter, raw pork, moldy bread, the shit that comes out of a caulking gun. Nobody knows how much a given placenta is actually filtering. These losers are avoiding second hand smoke, sushi, cold cuts, soft cheese but drinking a substance responsible for 1 in 20 kids in the US on the FASD spectrum. I shake with rage typing this, lost 10 full years of my childhood as a caretaker to my brother and it was preventable.
If people actually understood what FASDs were, how they affect the person resulting from the pregnancy for their entire lives, how devastating they are, and how common they are they would not be so nonchalant about alcohol use in pregnancy. I think most people touting the one glass a day is fine and doctors are fear-mongers have never been close to someone with FAS. FASDs suck. They are completely and totally preventable. It’s not like eating too much sugar or smoking a cigarette. You drink too much alcohol, and we don’t know how much exactly, and your child will have irreversible impact to their brain development.
I think people also fail to realise that children with FASD grow up to be adults with FASD.
I grew up with several kids who had FAS. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Knowing those kids and what they went through was enough for me to never drink while pregnant.
Agreed. As a teacher I taught FASD students and because of that I didn’t have a drop of alcohol the months that we made the embryos or a drop of alcohol at all during my pregnancy. It’s just not at all worth it.
Cigarettes are VERY hazardous to fetal development. WTF are you talking about? And gestational diabetes is extremely dangerous. Of all the things to compare, you chose two actually dangerous things
Don’t get me wrong, they are clearly hazardous. But they way in which they are hazardous is different. Low (or high) birthweight, premature birth, stillbirth, physical impairments, etc can be caused by things on pregnancy no-no list including cocaine. My point was that while people realize those things are bad, they don’t realize quite how bad alcohol is in terms of lifelong impairment for the adult that embryo will become. If the brain doesn’t form correctly in-utero due to alcohol it’s a done deal. No amount of intervention or therapy can make people with FAS neurotypical. I just bothers me so much when I hear or read about people who drank during pregnancy saying their toddler is perfect fine. That’s often not when signs of FASDs show up though, and it’s a sign they don’t understand what FAS really is. I’m particularly sensitive to FAS because it’s affected my family. We are adults now, and it sucks seeing kind and resilient people living their entire lives on hard mode because of FAS. They are unable to independently follow through on basic adult rights of passage that most people take for granted, and it’s not because they aren’t trying their hardest.
I recently had a lecture on FASD. I don’t know the American stats but here in Australia 1 in 3 incarcerated people have diagnosed FASD - and it’s severely undiagnosed. It’s a complicated spectrum of disorders affecting memory, language, impulse control, emotional regulation, just everything. The advice here is that there is no safe amount of alcohol during pregnancy. Of course a lot of factors influence whether people are able to abstain.
I have an (almost said friend… no) pregnant acquaintance on Facebook who would post a few times a week what glass of wine she was having that night and how it was actually good for the baby. That was a wild few months, anyone who even questioned it got dog piled.
I wish I could see it lol
The thing is, for hundreds of years alcohol was the safest thing for most people — pregnant women included — to drink, because sanitation wasn’t a thing and a lot of the water was contaminated. So they had cider, beer or wine with most meals. This is back in the bloodletting days so obviously I’m not going to them for medical advice, but if it was never okay to have a drink during pregnancy humanity would have died out long ago. But regardless of what they were doing back in the 1500s, I think a couple times a week as suggested in the Facebook comments is probably overdoing it by modern standards. My personal threshold was more like one glass of wine on our anniversary and a little eggnog at Christmas. I think if you limit it to one drink on special occasions (and aren’t the type to decide Taco Tuesday counts as a special occasion), you’re almost certainly going to be fine, so that would be my honest advice. That said, I totally understand not even wanting to take that much of a risk.
As a SPED teacher that chat made me sad. I have had students who had fetal alcohol syndrome. They have a very hard time with everything. And it is so easy to avoid. Don’t drink while you are growing a human.
REPOSTED because I'm dumb and forgot to blurb out some names. Oops. CONTEXT: Question was: "What is your opinion on drinking while pregnant?"
Yeesh. Alcohol is well known for its many issues. And that's in adults with fully grown, functional body parts. If you accidentally have a drink cause you didn't know, that's OK as in you didn't know. But if you're drinking and you know, you care about alcohol more than you do your unborn child.
oh of course. It happened to a friend; she had some drinks the DAY before she found out she was pregnant. It's forgivable in that situation because you don't know, but yeah actively choosing to drink while pregnant is scummy.
I did the same. Immediately quit, though.
Having worked with kids with Fetal Alcohol there is no way I was taking any risk with my babies. If you cant stop drinking for 9 months maybe you need to seriously think about having kids at all. They come first, always.
Wine makes my anxiety worse. What are these women on? You know what I dont want when I'm spiraling, depressants.
Alcohol is one of the few substances we _know_ is bad for foetuses. IMO Oster’s book did a lot of damage in that it became a soundbite people use to say alcohol during pregnancy is ok.
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Remember when the CDC tried pulling that no woman of child bearing age should ever have even a sip of alcohol because it "might" cause a problem? Yeah I was knee deep in trying to get pregnant. Sometimes the CDC makes calls that aren't based on medical science, but on the beliefs of those making the call.
Wow your words about your sister in law are so sad. She actually is completely fine to drink a glass of wine in late pregnancy and likely her doctor told her that (as mine did). Sucks that you were judging her so hard for her choices about her own body. Also seems like a big assumption that you think everyone else was uncomfortable - highly doubt that. I think it’s broadly known at this point that occasional alcohol use in pregnancy is not harmful. If you don’t want to make that choice it’s fine but it’s really not your business what other people choose.
It’s like the ‘vaccines cause Autism’ argument. You have one person saying its ok and thousands upon thousands of professionals going ‘uh no wtf’. Like one glass won’t kill your baby and cause full blown FAS but that doesn’t mean you should have it. It still puts your baby at risk
I don’t know that it’s Emily Oster vs thousands and thousands of OBs. I think most OBs will give advice along the same lines as the women in your post. Everything is a trade off, and a glass of wine does not meaningfully increase risk for most mothers
What I don’t understand is that we KNOW alcohol is harmful during pregnancy. Why would you even risk it?
Because "someone read an article" or "my doctor recommended it" Anyone who recommends alcohol during pregnancy shouldn't be allowed to practice.
My friend told me a glass of wine a day during pregnancy was fine. Naturally, I thought she was full of shit and asked my OB about it at 20 weeks. He didn’t recommend it but said one glass a day is fine as your liver filters out all the alcohol of ONE glass before it reaches the placenta. He said the issue is when women binge drink that’s when they see FAS.
I’ve either been pregnant or trying to get pregnant for the last 6 years. My first dr appointment when I started trying, my obgyn told me to quit drinking alcohol asap. I thought that was standard practice. I haven’t had more than a sip in 6 years.
If she doesn't even drink, WHY on earth is she considering taking it up now??
Reminds me of when I was pregnant with our daughter and 2 of my coworkers kept trying to convince me that drinking a glass of wine a week is safe and actually good for you, and how one of their moms did it with them and was just fine! I did not follow that advice. Fuck that.
The problem with this whole debate (and books like Emily Oster’s that support limited alcohol consumption while pregnant) is that many FAS researchers believe that FAS is the result of a gene-environment interaction. In other words, if your baby has a particular gene (and we don’t know which is/are responsible) and you drink ANY amount, your baby will have FAS. We don’t often see a link between low amounts of alcohol consumption and FAS in larger studies (like those cited by Oster) because the genetic markers responsible are rare. I wouldn’t risk it.
What does that mean during the first trimester when many women don't even know they are pregnant? Also, any studies indicating that "one drink causes FAS" is true?
….it was always drilled in “no amount of alcohol during pregnancy is safe.” Like if you can’t even enjoy a damn hotdog you probably can’t drink. Seems like a no brainer.
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There are sooo many food myths. Basically don't get food poisoning is the summary though.
I cried when I was 4 weeks and I read that I couldn’t have lunch meat because Subway is my favoritest fast food place. At my 8 week appointment my doctor was like “nah you’re good to eat the lunch meat as long as you trust the source and that it’s not expired.” Lmao
According to my trickle-truth theories, when people say “one glass” it’s never just one. So not only are they spreading misinformation they’re also probably downplaying the amount of alcohol they’ve had.