Doctors say no amount of alcohol is safe during pregnancy

But repeated claims that small amounts may be safe, along with surveys showing that a percentage of women continue drinking alcohol during pregnancy, have prompted the American Academy of Pediatrics to publish an updated report today in its online journal Pediatrics.

There have been warnings about the hazards of alcohol use during pregnancy for decades, but the CDC said that one in 10 women report drinking anyway. Christina Chambers, PhD, a professor of pediatrics at the Center for Better Beginnings at the University of California, San Diego, told HealthDay: “The best advice is to avoid pregnancy if drinking and avoid drinking if pregnant”.

Indeed, according to Janni Niclasen, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Copenhagen who has studied alcohol and pregnancy, “With our current research methods, we will never be able to conclude from human studies whether there is a safe lower level below which drinking is not associated with any harm to the developing fetus”. Not all babies whose moms drank while pregnant will end up having problems, of course.

Still, Williams said the safest and “smartest” choice for pregnant women and their child is to “just abstain from alcohol completely”. Instead, they only show “that in certain study populations under certain conditions, there is or is not sufficient evidence of effect that can be attributable to alcohol exposure”.

In addition, birth defects affecting the heart, kidneys, bones and even hearing have been linked to alcohol use during pregnancy. Women who drank while pregnant were more likely to be over 35, college educated and unmarried.

But there’s no escaping the fact that as a whole, studies on drinking while pregnant show increased risk to the baby.

There’s abundant evidence that binge-drinking while pregnant is harmful.

“Even though fetal alcohol spectrum disorders are the most commonly identifiable causes of developmental delays and intellectual disabilities, they remain significantly under-recognized”, Williams said. And a 2013 study found that drinking in the first trimester increases the risk of symptoms 12 times; drinking in first and second trimesters increased risk 61 times; and drinking throughout pregnancy increased it 65 times. It was first dubbed “tragic disorder” because of the characteristic facial abnormalities and mental retardation born from women who reported alcohol consumption during their pregnancy. “No alcohol means no [fetal alcohol spectrum disorders]”.