Alcohol and pregnancy: can you drink? How much is safe? Should I be worried if I had that glass of wine before I realized I was pregnant? These are legitimate concerns.
First, what we know to be true:
Binge drinking, which is defined as a woman having more than 4 drinks in a short period of time or enough alcohol to raise her blood alcohol level to .08 or greater, is bad. It increases the risk of miscarriage and the baby runs the real risk of developmental and physical effects.
But what about a single drink once in a while during the pregnancy? To try to answer that question, a paper was recently published in the Journal, BMJ Open. They reviewed every paper published between 1950 and July 2016 that looked at what happened to the pregnancy and the babies of women who drank up to 32 grams of alcohol per week, that’s the equivalent of about 2 pints of beer or 2 glasses of wine / week. Out of thousands of studies, only 24 met the researchers’ criteria. The result of all their analysis: there was very little scientific evidence demonstrating a clear safe limit to how much a woman could drink during her pregnancy.
So the recommendation must be that women shouldn’t drink during their pregnancy because we have no proof that it’s safe and we don’t know if there is a safe cut off limit beyond which we can predict the risk to the Mom or to the baby.
What about that drink before I knew I was pregnant? Again, the sad truth is there is no hard scientific information. So the only safe answer I can give now is that if you are not on contraception and could become pregnant and would want to keep that pregnancy, then you should also abstain from alcohol. If you become pregnant under these circumstances, do let your doctor know so that they can monitor the pregnancy appropriately.