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Richardson & Almeling on the CDC’s Pre-pregnancy & FASD “Guidelines” – Life as an Extreme Sport
Life as an Extreme Sport

Richardson & Almeling on the CDC’s Pre-pregnancy & FASD “Guidelines”

Although it’s not the first thing you learn in ethics, the idea that you’re not going to be popular probably should be; it really does make life a lot easier. After all, a large part of the job of the ethicist is to be unpopular:

  • no, you can’t modify that flu virus so that it’s more contagious and more deadly than the lovechild of smallpox and the Spanish flu;
  • yes, it’s okay that this person wants to die;
  • no, you can’t just put fecael microbes in open brain wounds;
  • sorry, no, the science doesn’t support your claim;
  • who will the car hit;
  • you fired everyone NOW;
  • does the benefit justify risk; and so on.

You get the idea.

So I wasn’t terribly surprised to face the typical backlash when I noted just how unscientific, shaming, stigmatizing, and plain wrong the CDC’s recent “treat every woman1 as pre-pregnant”2 declaration that no person with a uterus should drink3 unless 100% certain there’s no uterus-crasher in residence was—but it’s always nice when folks who have the respected PhD after their name (and are at Ivy League universities) join the chorus.

I recommend reading Richardson and Almeling’s op-ed in it’s entirety, but here are the choice pieces:

The CDC’s overly broad advisory damages its credibility as a source of clear, balanced advice about health risks. A risk may be “real,” but it may not be large or well substantiated. The CDC claims that “drinking any alcohol at any stage of pregnancy can cause a range of disabilities” for a woman’s child.” Yet a balanced review of the scientific evidence does not support such unequivocal claims. In fact, medical research suggests just the opposite. For example, the Danish National Birth Cohort Lifestyle During Pregnancy Study demonstrated that moderate drinking during pregnancy carries no long-term risks.

CDCBeClearFirst, the CDC needs to be clear that science on the risk of alcohol during pregnancy is far from settled. Any advice about reproduction should respect the autonomy and intelligence of women by presenting evidence in its full context. Public health officials should provide perspective about the size of the effects relative to other common risk factors. And they should be straightforward in describing the evidentiary base for health advisories.

The CDC can regain credibility in this realm by providing information to women and men that details the relative risks of various behaviors, as well as the state of scientific debate regarding the evidence supporting these assessments

The CDC’s mission is to identify and address clear and present dangers to the public health. As such, their credibility is literally a matter of life and death … Issuing guidelines with all the nuance of a sledgehammer only damages the public’s trust in federal health recommendations.

There are possible risks to drinking while pregnant, and women should be told what those risks are. But they’re not clear-cut, they’re not well-understood, and there’s no guarantee that abstaining from alcohol means a baby won’t be diagnosed with Fetal Alochol Spectrum Disorder; like many disorders, it’s a diagnosis of exclusion, and the criteria for diagnosis does not require confirmation of alcohol consumption during pregnancy (and in fact, at least one paper in Pediatrics suggests that if a woman has a child diagnosed with FASD and says she abstained during pregnancy, she must be lying about her drinking habit).

But there are a lot of risks to women while pregnant, and unless you’re advcating that women be padded in bubblewrap and never let outside of a padded room while pregnant (which in itself is probably a risk for something), then pregnancy, like life itself, is about balancing risks, benefits, and rewards. In order to make decisions in an accurate risk/benefit analysis, women first need to know what the science, not a sledgehammer of paternalistic unscientific fearmomgering.