Alcohol drunk to excess is harmful to anyone, but no safe threshhold has been identified for fetal alcohol syndrome.

CDC should not have assumed that all menstruating women are engaging in intercourse with men, but I can’t see the objection to the information.

P.S. I saw the eugenics exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Museum last month, which included a Nazi poster urging Aryan women not to drink or smoke while pregnant. The bastards didn’t give a damn about what pregnant Jewish or Gypsy women did.

Actually, yes, I do find the warnings on cigarette labels and alcohol offensive. Cigarettes should be outlawed, period. Alcohol, drunk in excess, is harmful to all people, not just pregnant women.

I don’t need the federal government treating me like my first and only duty in life is to have babies.

On a very remotely related point, the reviews of the third X-men movie are in, and they’re not good. Think “Return of the Jedi”–the weak sister in the trilogy. Among its flaws, it’s reported to be misogynous as all get-out, with Jean Grey/Phoenix presented as something of a succubus who keeps her clothes on.

I wrote the above after reading the news article, but not any of the follow-up.

Doc, if that is the case, then our educational system is partly to blame, and our parenting is partly to blame. Whatever happened to health class? Sex ed? Mother/daughter nights? Hell, I learned about menstruation in fifth grade (and learned how to embarrass boys by talking about it in the very same year, go figure).

No, Sabba Hillel, the insulting part about the article is that it treats women as potential baby machines instead of women. Everything they suggest for the baby’s health would increase the woman’s health. They might have made that the focus, and added that side benefits would be to have healthy babies in case of unintended pregancy.

I think that you can fill in the rest of the rant appropriately. Looking at the way people write nowadays, I wonder how we all survived to our current ages.

I do understand Doctor‘s point of view however.

Sabba Hillel

With all due respect to all the very competent women out there there’s a high percentage of people coming through my office who are not aware of their cycles, are not very consistent about birth control [“are you sexually active?” “yes” are you using birth control?” “no” “do you want to become pregnant?” “no”] or are just plain reluctant to tell us whether they’re at risk for pregnancy.

I don’t take these guidelines as insulting; I take them as realism. Because a disturbing number of women become pregnant without knowing, don’t find out they’re pregnant until 3-4 months later, and then it’s late in the game to start with folic acid, cigarette and alcohol reduction, and good prenatal care.
I wouldn’t take this as an insult, or as an analogy to “pre-drunk.” It’s a response to a very real and very difficult situation.