Let’s have a pregnant pause over last orders from WHO

There has been widespread condemnation of the World Health Organisation’s advice that women of childbearing age should not drink alcohol. It’s bad enough that women are lectured to when pregnant, but now we’re being told what’s best for us the rest of the time, or at least until we hit 50.

In its draft global alcohol action plan for 2022-2030, the WHO’s recommendations are so disproportionate that they are unlikely to be taken seriously, least of all by those they target, and could even be counter-productive.

“Absurd”, “unscientific”, “paternalistic”, and “sexist” are some of the kinder things that have been said about the plan’s authors. Perhaps we should add “naïve”; how many couples would get together in the first place if women were banned from drinking? How many conceptions would have been avoided if alcohol had not been a factor somewhere along the line?

To single out all women capable of giving birth, including those who don’t want children, has made the WHO easy to mock. But there is a lot of sanctimonious scaremongering around alcohol and pregnancy that women suspect would not exist if men bore the babies.

The NHS issues advice for good reason because there are risks (such as low birth weight and foetal alcohol spectrum disorders) associated with alcohol abuse and having a child. But like all public health advice (until March 2020) rational adults are indeed able to use their own discretion.

Women’s bodies tend to be the most reliable gauge of acceptable drinking levels during pregnancy. In fact, often, the first sign that you are with child is intolerance for the things you like most.

With me, it was whisky, not my preferred tipple but the currency in the glens of Angus on Hogmanay, which is where I was at the end of 1996. I knew something was up when the peaty whiff of the Lagavulin turned my stomach, rather a dilemma as the very air we breathed was infused with its fumes.

I couldn’t touch the stuff for another year or so, but when my daughter (who weighed in healthy at eight pounds) was a few months old, whisky featured again in our lives.

After a colleague’s funeral in Edinburgh, I was flying to London, made doubly trying, and traumatic thanks to the baby carried in her harness throughout.

Much of the funeral party was in the departure lounge, and drams were inevitably passed around, including to the harassed mother with babe on board, for which I am eternally grateful.

The experience restored my faith in Scottish hospitality after an episode at eight and a half months pregnant (same infant) on a yacht in Loch Nevis. This time it was gin and tonics, July and quite pleasant bobbing about on the boat until the skipper confiscated my glass.

I was speechless (though recollections may vary). My decision to go sailing late into my first pregnancy was not frowned upon, nor was the hairy – with my third-trimester girth – transfer to shore by dinghy. Only the warm gin was deemed dangerous.

Men being overprotective in the vicinity of pregnant women who are not their partners may be well-meaning, but they betray their patriarchal urge to control us.

It is only 40 years since women could be legally refused a drink in pubs; we have come a long way since then, except when we start our families, and our reproductive capacity becomes a common resource.

Then everyone can tell us what to do. Last year the NHS advisory body NICE proposed that pregnant women who drink alcohol should have their consumption listed on their baby’s medical records.

The move, apart from threatening women’s privacy, took a sledgehammer to crack a nut, tackling the very few problem drinkers by stigmatising all mothers to be. Yet, there is no evidence that moderate levels of drinking harm unborn children.

The British Pregnancy Advisory Service warned that guidelines that go too far could break the trust between women and midwives. But we should call time on any advice that treats us like blithering idiots on account of our biology.

The Chief Medical Officers for the UK say the safest approach is not to drink alcohol at all if you’re pregnant or planning on becoming pregnant. This overlooks the fact that if you’re not planning a baby, you may well have been imbibing right up to conception and about one month thereafter, which is typically when the expectant mother clocks her predicament.

The WHO’s blanket ban would get around this, removing any chance of alcohol-fuelled fertilisation, but think of all the “mistakes” that may not have made it into the world with such diktats in place.

If the WHO had its way, brides would not be allowed to drink at their receptions; the one thing they can still do now Covid restrictions have outlawed dancing and singing.

There would be no booze, for the girls anyway, at 18th or 21st birthday parties and even worn out, but pre-menopausal, middle-aged mums would be denied perhaps their only wicked indulgence, a glass of wine.

During my second pregnancy, I found wine repellent, but champagne was okay. It was an expensive switch but a bonny baby (nine pounds), and nearly 21 years later, I have no regrets and certainly no guilt.