New CDC recommendations released Tuesday state that all women of childbearing age should abstain entirely from alcohol, unless they use contraceptives. Come again? On first reading, one might think that they are on to something. Everyone knows that drinking during pregnancy is bad. Well…the research is actually mixed. But, aside from attempting to address the real problem of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, which can have lasting impact on children, it makes a lot of bad assumptions about women, it’s unrealistic, and it might not be entirely evidence-based.
My first thought when reading the report was that this type of government recommendation sounds like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale. In Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, a theocratic dictatorship takes away women’s rights and separates them into classes. Fertile women of childbearing age are kept as handmaids for reproductive purposes by the ruling class after a large portion of the female population becomes sterile due to pollution and sexually transmitted diseases. They live under strict control of their wealthy male captors, and are treated as vessels for potential life.
From Steph on Grounded Parents with “The CDC Can Rip the Wine Glass Out of My Childbearing-Aged Hand”.
I have written about the policing of pregnant women and alcohol .. oh, once or twice before..
Light drinking during pregnancy
Public health message of the day: don’t trust women, especially when they’re incubating
Whenever people start talking about the “unborn child”
Complete, garbage, THEORIES about HEALTH you lunatic.
On its website, the CDC (in an info-graphic) also lists sexual assault as one of the ‘short term risks’ of consuming alcohol.
We should propose an alternative model: fertile men are not allowed to get sperm near fertile women who are enjoying a drink, on penalty of something really oppressive and intrusive and generally degrading that includes the government obsessing about their privates in a public way.
This is especially infuriating given the United States absolutely terrible record on anything that is a collective responsibility for maternal and neonatal health, from universal prenatal health care to maternity leave to workplace safety or, in the news again but a constant public health problem, lead.
More women have gone to jail for using drugs or alcohol while pregnant than will for the systematic poisoning of children in Flint (or Milwaukee, or Wind River).