Percent of Pregnant Women Drink Alcohol, Study Says

Eighteen percent of pregnant women age 35 and older admitted drinking alcohol in the past 30 days, the CDC said in a news report released Thursday.

This study pulled data from CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), which is a state-based, landline and cell phone survey of the USA population.

“Again, there’s no safe amount and no safe type of alcohol to drink during pregnancy”, Tan said.

“We all sometimes feel that alcohol is something which most people drink, and alcohol is not illegal, and it’s part of culture and is acceptable”, Balachova said.

These trends might be a sign that women who binge-drink even when they are pregnant are more likely to be alcohol-dependent than other binge-drinkers, the report authors speculated.

Additionally, more than half of pregnancies in the USA are unintended, meaning a woman might not know she’s pregnant when she’s drinking, Balachova said.

According in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ingesting spirits in the course of pregnancy can have issues for instance accident, incomplete arrival, and stillbirth, and could also prohibit the creation of the infant and cause delivery imperfections. But the more educated the women were, the more likely they were to admit to drinking.

“I work in a unit with 20 physicians and we don’t agree on everything, but we all agree there should be no drinking during pregnancy”, she said.

Some of the women who drink while pregnant may have problems with alcohol that make it hard to give it up entirely and some, especially the binge drinkers, may be in denial about the potential risks. Since 1981, the surgeon general has advised pregnant women to abstain from drinking to prevent fetal alcohol syndrome, a condition that combines “severe physical and mental defects”. Just over 56 percent of adult Americans report having at least one drink in the past month. The researchers noted women may not want to admit to behavior they know is harmful, and women often do not realize they are pregnant for the first four weeks or sometimes longer. Alcohol passes from mother to fetus and experts advise women who are pregnant or who may become pregnant to just keep away from alcohol.

The researchers also found that unmarried women were more likely to drink during pregnancy (12.9 percent) than their married counterparts (7.9 percent).

Her basic message urges women to “take back their pregnancy”. Although more non-pregnant women indulged in binge drinking, women who were pregnant reported 4.6 episodes of binge drinking over the past month, as opposed to only 3.1 episodes reported by non-pregnant women.