Public health message of the day: don’t trust women, especially when they’re incubating

More of my value-not-particular-adding posts.

I point you to Lauredhel’s must-read piece here at Hoyden About Town on the way studies on women drinking alcohol during pregnancy are reported in the media. This kind of dumbed down public health policy approach, with all its moralising and infantilising of women really irritates the shit out of me… I’ll add public health policies on co-sleeping to this category too.

The “We must tell them there’s no safe dose” mentality comes from a place of infantilisation of women. It is assumed that we’re stuck in the pre-rational child phase, and that any ‘concessions’ by those who think they are in power will lead us to ‘take’ far more than we’re entitled to. (Inch, mile, etc).

It is assumed that if women are told the actual data – that there is no evidence that having a couple of standard drinks harms a fetus – that we will immediately rip off our matronly long skirts and whoop it up in nights out on the town. It is assumed that we’re just hanging back from boozing it up because we’re waiting for “permission”. It is assumed that we just couldn’t possibly understaaaaaand the reality of the dose being the poison. It is assumed that it is doctors’ and midwives’ responsibility to shield us from reality and give us “unambiguous” absolutist messages about abstinence.

It is assumed that we as women, as incubators, cannot take responsibility for ourselves and our decisions. So someone else must take it for us, and that those people need to twist and simplify the message in order for us to comprehend it with our tiny hormone-soaked inferior brains.