Sensible people have known this all along. The anti-pleasure kooks have no trouble conflating the fetal alcohol syndrome of raging alcoholics with the perfectly normal children born to moderate drinkers for 10,000 years or more. They are wrong.

On the other hand, my mother drank and smoked. Do you want to risk having a baby Fnarf?

Eh, you mean that load your toting around your waist ISN'T a baby? Well, I guess congratulations are not in order, Brandon.

Finally! I drank sparingly during my 3rd trimester and can't believe how many dirty looks I got the one time I drank a (shared!) glass of bubbly in public. People get so extreme about controlling what pregnant women do.
(and what Fnarf said, BTW)

Yes, I think a pregnant woman with tired feet and swollen ankles and frayed nerves should enjoy the health benefits of a glass of wine every night.

So long as you lay off the Absinthe after a few glasses a day, you should be fine.

Er, I'd still lay of the sauce, actually. When my mother was prego with me she was told to stay away from alchohol as much as possible. She only had a glass of red wine once or twice a week. (Which is the same amount in the study.) Her friend, also knocked up, was told she could drink moderately. "Moderately" being no more than three martinis a day. So she did. I turned out ok, but the friends kid is er..."special" if you catch my drift.

My mother stopped drinking when she found out she was pregnant. She did not, however, stop smoking pot and was smoking a joint when her water broke. I turned out pretty decent, I think.

And my parents finished it on the way to the hospital.

Light drinking? So as long as it's light beer, you're golden, right?

Yeah, I'm going out and getting drunk right now--let's make some magic, Kiley!

Beer and alcohol evolved as a way to have clean drinking water in the absence of such. So, the barbarians drank beer as their water.

Up until the 20th century, most babies were born inebriated.

And that's the fact -- JACK!

What fnarf said.

Doubleplusgood.

About bloody time, the whole one drop = FAS thing never made any sense to me. It's nice to have some data to back that up.

My mother used to be a prenatal teacher and I distinctly remember her on the phone to one of her students whose baby was having a particularly bouncy night. She suggested having a beer - the effect of that small amount of alcohol would be enough to relax both the mother and baby, and she could get some sleep. I told that story to someone a few years back and they looked horrified.

Perfectly normal people turn into complete fascists when confronted with a pregnant woman. A friend of mine couldn't breastfeed - the baby wasn't getting enough nutrition from the milk and was losing weight. Total strangers would accost her on the street and tell her the horrible damage she was doing to her baby by not breastfeeding.

This is what happens in a country filled primarily with idiots who have no concept of common sense. You need expensive research to tell you something that anyone with any form of intelligence has known all along.

its scary living on top of you all

Fortunately for my siblings and I, it was my dad who did the virtually total pie chart of the drinking.

@6: your mom's friend wasn't a moderate drinker. she was a heavy drinker. this is yet another example of absurd, typically american overreactions to commonplace risk.

like fucking taking your kid's candy to the hospital to be xrayed..

@2:

Goodness knows, I've been pretty tough on Kiley lately, but in his defense, I must say, the dude is damned SVELT!

(And I say that in a total, "older het guy comfortable in his sexuality, and not inferring anything beyond the substance of the statement itself" kind of way.)

So, Napoleon - he's all yours.

I hope Obama turns the entire fucking USA into Sweden so all us boys can get sex change operations, then get preggers and rip-snortin' drunky-kunky. Let's roll!