There are plenty of things you can do to endanger your unborn child while pregnant. Not all of them are as bad as this.
Let’s just say this: drinking alcohol while you’re pregnant is not good for you or the fetus.
Okay, that’s out of the way.
Now here’s a shocker: 1 in 10 women in America drink while they’re pregnant, and a third of those women binge drink.
What?
It’s true. In a study done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in ten pregnant women between the years of 2011 and 2013 reported that they’d consumed alcohol at least once. This was a study done on the drinking habits of 200,000 women, over 8,000 of whom were pregnant.
What’s more, one in 33 women said that they’d done some binge drinking, that is, consuming four or more drinks in one sitting.
If you’re keeping track, that’s four more drinks than any pregnant woman should be drinking.
Not only that, but women who binge drank while pregnant did so more frequently than women who binge drank not while pregnant.
It’s long been established that there’s no safe amount of alcohol to drink while you’re pregnant. Nothing has changed, either in the public health community’s perception of drinking while pregnant or in actual science.
Colleen Boyle, director of CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, told NBC: “We know that alcohol use during pregnancy can cause birth defects and developmental disabilities in babies, as well as an increased risk of other pregnancy problems, such as miscarriage, stillbirth, and prematurity.
“This is an important reminder that women should not drink any alcohol while pregnant. It’s just not worth the risk.”
