Every one knows alcohol is bad during pregnancy. But why is it bad and how much is it bad.
Is it like a blanket ban type of bad or you can take it sparingly bad.
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The only known, certainly safe amount is zero smoking and zero alcohol.
Above that, there is probably some amount that doesn’t do significant harm. However, we don’t know what that amount is, because there is no good research on this topic. Let’s take alcohol as an example, but everything I say also holds for smoking. The most reliable data would come from a controlled experiment, where you randomly assign different groups of pregnant women to drink different amounts of alcohol during their pregnancy, and then observe how their child develops. I don’t need to explain why it would be completely unethical to run such an experiment.
So, the only data we have is *post-hoc* (after the fact): we can ask women if and how much they drank during pregnancy, and then observe the results. However, this faces two big problems. First, people’s self-reports will tend to be inaccurate, and in particular mothers likely feel pressure to underestimate the amount they drank – even in an anonymous survey. Second, even if you find a correlation between drinking certain amounts and negative health outcomes for the child, you can’t be certain how much of that is really explained by drinking, and how much by other factors that correlate with drinking during pregnancy. Especially given that there is (justifiably) such a strong stigma against drinking during pregnancy, the kind of person who does drink during pregnancy likely deviates from the norm in other respects too. Like, they may be more likely to also smoke or do other drugs, or eat an unhealthy diet, or generally live a less healthy lifestyle. Or maybe they have mental health issues which the child might inherit regardless of their mother’s drinking.
Since we don’t know, the only responsible recommendation is to not drink (or smoke) at all. Having said that, occasionally taking one small tasting sip of, say, your partner’s wine when you’re going out for dinner, is obviously fine.
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