A friend on Facebook brought this story to my attention:
The Australian Institute of Family Studies has found almost 40 per cent of Australian women drink while they are pregnant.
The study examined more than 10,000 children born between 1999-00 and 2003-04.
In the second group, 38 per cent of mothers reported drinking alcohol at some stage of their pregnancy, 10 percentage points higher than the first group.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find the study on the Institute’s website so I was unable to take a closer look at it. I say ‘unfortunately’ because the news story omits the most relevant detail: how much they are drinking. The best designed study I’ve seen on the topic found that children “born to mothers who drank up to 1–2 drinks per week or per occasion during pregnancy were not at increased risk of clinically relevant behavioural difficulties or cognitive deficits”. Here is the summary from Discovery:
Final results of the study, published today in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, agreed with previous work that children born to heavy binge drinkers do worst on developmental tests, because excessive exposure to alcohol in the womb kills nerve cells and causes brain damage.
The kids of teetotalers did almost as poorly, however, reflecting the complicated phenomenon that people who never drink have poor outcomes on many measures of health.
But the study found no evidence that light drinking during pregnancy causes emotional or learning problems in children through the age of five. In some tests of vocabulary and pattern creation, boys actually did best if their moms drank a little while carrying them. The findings confirmed what the researchers had found when the kids were three years old.
So the fact that “40% of mums drink while pregnant” could be harmless or horrifying depending on whether they have one or two drinks every now and then or are putting Bacardi 151 in their cereal every morning. Leaving out this crucial detail renders the article virtually meaningless, though I have a hard time believing that this was reported for any other reason than giving Helen Lovejoy types something to tut tut about.
Another interesting tidbit came later in the story:
In 2001 Commonwealth guidelines advised it was safe to drink small amounts, but two years ago it was changed to recommend no alcohol consumption during pregnancy.
Since the study is–as Fred Bookstein, a statistician who studies fetal alcohol spectrum disorders put it–”such a good study that it should shut down this line of research”, this suggests Australia is moving backward from acknowledging the best scientific research to simply demonizing alcohol because, fuck it, why not? Ugh.
oindge
