A new US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that women of childbearing age who are sexually active and not using birth control stop drinking alcohol altogether. 鈥淭he risk is real. Why take the chance?鈥� the CDC鈥檚 principal deputy director is quoted as saying .
The agency鈥檚 logic is that about half of all American pregnancies are unplanned, and many women don鈥檛 know that they鈥檙e pregnant for the first month or so. But it鈥檚 the kind of swath-yourself-in-bubble-wrap thinking that has turned modern pregnancy into a nine-month slog of joyless paranoia.
The CDC has been a leader in the better-safe-than-sorry school of pregnancy care for at least a decade now. A 2006 recommended that all women between their first period and menopause take folic acid, avoid smoking and maintain a healthy weight to prepare for pregnancy, just in case.
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At the time, critics accused the government of viewing millions of women as 鈥減re-pregnant鈥�, regardless of whether they were planning on having babies soon, or ever.
The latest recommendation to avoid alcohol completely is obviously out of step with the way many 鈥減re-pregnant鈥� people live their lives. (Imagine how the birth rate would drop if women never took a sip.) But unlike the well-tested advice to take folic acid, it is also unnecessarily restrictive of women who are pregnant or trying to be.
Out of step
The CDC鈥檚 recommendation is also out of step with the way a of pregnant women, especially older and more educated mothers-to-be, choose not to abstain from alcohol. And many doctors seem perfectly comfortable with moderate alcohol consumption in the late stages of pregnancy. When I told my doctor that I was enjoying a glass of wine per week in my third trimester, she didn鈥檛 bat an eye.
With the obligatory caveat that heavy drinking in pregnancy can be extremely damaging, the commonly repeated notion that there is 鈥渘o known safe amount of alcohol鈥� for pregnant women is seriously misleading.
As the economist Emily Oster pointed out in her 2013 book , there is also no 鈥減roven safe鈥� level of paracetamol (acetaminophen) or caffeine, and yet both are fine in moderation during pregnancy.
Oster pored through reams of research on alcohol and pregnancy for her book and concluded that there is simply no scientific evidence that light drinking during pregnancy impacts a baby鈥檚 health. (In one frequently cited 2001 study that suggested it increases the chances of a child displaying aggressive behaviours, the drinkers were also significantly likelier to have taken cocaine during pregnancy.)
The backlash to this dose of sanity was swift and severe, as Oster , but I recommend her sanity-preserving book to any pregnant woman overwhelmed by advice like the CDC鈥檚.
What the heck, I鈥檒l go CDC-style and recommend it to anyone who could possibly ever become pregnant, at any point in the future, no matter how small the odds. Why take the chance?
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