Here’s a new fact you may not know: about 1 in 10 pregnant women have admitted to drinking alcohol, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s survey of over 200,000 women taken between 2011 and 2013.
The study included 8,333 women who were pregnant at the time, and found that older mothers were the most likely to drink during their pregnancy than first-time moms, while college graduates were twice as likely to drink than their non-graduate peers; unmarried women are apparently 4.6 times as likely to drink as married women.
Interestingly, however, several European studies have found that drinking in moderation while pregnant actually doesn’t cause anything weird. One Danish study found that the babies of moms who did drink were better adjusted, while another found that women could actually drink up to eight alcoholic beverages a week in early stages of pregnancy without doing any damage to the baby.
READ: New Study Tells Pregnant Ladies – Drink Up
Of course, the CDC strongly disagrees–Coleen Boyle, director of the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities stated in an interview:
“We know that alcohol use during pregnancy can cause birth defects and developmental disabilities in babies, as well as an increased risk of other pregnancy problems, such as miscarriage, stillbirth and prematurity.”
Kveller readers, what do you think about this? Did you choose to drink, or not drink, while you were pregnant?