It would be great if we could tell expecting mothers: "have two drinks a week, you'll be fine." We don't know, so "don't drink at all" is a reasonable statement.
Now, absence of proof is not proof of absence, but in what other contexts do we tell people: the studies don't show harmful effects at low levels, but you shouldn't do it anyway because the studies haven't proven there aren't harmful effects at low levels? That's not how we generally do things. We only say "no" when we have actual evidence that some activity is harmful.
The reason we do it is not because science demonstrates there is a danger. We do it because we as a society love to control women, their behavior and their bodies, and pregnancy offers a great opportunity to exert that control.
This latter theory is a bit silly.
In fact, we say "no" to all sorts of things regardless of evidence that the activity is harmful. Examples include modafinil, steroids and various other brain and body enhancers. More commonplace examples include salt, fat, carbs, second hand smoke, marijuana, gluten and foods not present in the cave man era.
| We do it because we as a society love to
| control women
In our society, where drinking is an important social rite, not drinking makes you "the other" and we're tremendously eager to force women into that position based on little to no evidence that it actually has any impact on children at low levels. Even the justifications that are possible ("doctors say not to do it at all because women might drink too much") treat women like children instead of adults who are capable of evaluating truthful information from their doctors and reaching reasoned conclusions about their behavior.
You don't think "Think of the Children" is part of the "Women need to be controlled" category? This is also where we get the notion that there is a magical mystical maternal mojo.
Women are resources, not players.
Also, simple rules are easy to state and simple to follow. The words "never" and "always" are very clear and leave no room for misinterpretation.
However, if any of my speculation is correct, and public health messages are tuned to account for their real world affect, than perhaps there is a risk that they will loose credibility.
Erm...in health and safety related contexts. At least in countries that care about those things. When it comes to someone's life isn't that hard to assume that if something is considered it could even be dangerous or not enough is known to advise staying away from it, rather than way and find out until experiments have shown otherwise.
Seems like a no brainier to me. To put it another way, if you are a parent, do you want your child or wife to participate in a study where she told to go ahead and drink 15 glasses of wine while pregnant so 20 year from then they can publish a paper on it.
To put it yet another way, each person has only one life and if they are told it is ok to consume a substance because there is not evidence it is harmful but then oops it turns out it is, they don't get a do over. It is not like buying a car someone saying, wash it with this new acid substance and it rusts and has to be replaced. You can replace a car, you can't replace your body.
Moreover. It is considered unlikely that alcohol will help in the pregnancy case. It seems at best it won't have any effect and at worst it will have a detrimental effect. Again, seems like a pretty good reason for the advice to stay away from it for 9 months.
> We do it because we as a society love to control women, their behavior and their bodies, and pregnancy offers a great opportunity to exert that control.
See now I don't know if you are serious or sarcastic. That is a pretty ridiculous argument. Sure go ahead and tell your wife, friends and family to drink so they can liberate themselves from the shackles of the Western Anglo-Saxon While Male Dominated Society
A specific 'health and safety' context where this exact issue comes up is actually with ionizing radiation (such as from nuclear reactors).
Humans (like most animals) actually have a remarkable ability to overcome low levels of radiation damage, by means such as genetic repair, programmed apotosis (essentially ASSERT()s in your own genetic code), and even roving patrols by your immune system that catch pre-cancerous cells.
The problem is that it is difficult to determine whether there is a real low-dose threshold, below which people do not suffer appreciable increase in health risk from radiation. Also, whether that threshold depends on the person, depends on prior exposure, depends on type of dose received, a combination of the above, etc.
The evidence leans heavily to there being a threshold much higher than the levels of radiation we'd ever encounter in day-to-day life (and possibly even there being a beneficial effect to low levels of radiation).
But our radiation health physicists (and UN health organizations) have tended to take a very conservative view and simply recommend that people minimize radiation exposure, at least until there is enough evidence to make very clear what a safe threshold level is.
Exactly. The rule is not "put on your seatbelt except when you don't plan to exceed 10mph and there are no obvious nearby hazards, or if the windows are open and you're near a body of water," the rule is "always wear a seat belt."
If American society would tolerate it, surely we'd have anti-drunk driving laws that allowed no higher BAC than naturally occurs due to metabolism.
In contexts where the effects aren't suffered by the person making the choice, but by someone else that's at their mercy--in this case, the child. Making decisions about one's own risk is very different from making decisions about someone else's; the latter involves a much greater responsibility to avoid possible harm.