Is that your second cup of tea?
Pregnancy can feel like a nine-month ordeal of abstinence for some women. Suddenly, what seemed like perfectly harmless foodstuffs in the past are to be avoided – they are to eat no unpastuerised, blue-veined or mould-ripened cheeses, no hollandaise sauce, no sushi or shellfish, no pate or liver, no swordfish, marlin or shark and probably no nuts. Alcohol is to be avoided, and caffeine to be carefully limited, so tea, coffee and cola all have to be treated with caution.
The list is long and nine months can seem like an eternity if you love sushi or French cheese. Often, you crave the very thing you can’t have.
So can you allow yourself a little of what you fancy? In most cases, an accidental slip won’t have serious consequences. But for some the risks are much higher than others. Eating unpasteurised cheeses or sauces made with raw eggs (such as hollandaise), for example, carries with it the risk of exposing the unborn child to listeria, which can be very dangerous. Most people would want to avoid this risk for the full nine months.
Other substances are OK in small doses. Caffeine is believed to affect the unborn child, but health visitors still advise that tea, coffee and cola can be drunk in moderation. The same was true of alcohol – until recently. In March, the official advice from the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) was to drink no alcohol at all.
So what has changed? Is there more evidence of the harmful effects of alcohol on the unborn child? Well, there is no new evidence that small amounts of alcohol have a lasting effect on the unborn child. In fact, only a year before, NICE suggested that pregnant women could safely drink a glass of wine a day. And although there is growing awareness of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and its serious and lasting effects, there is no evidence that the syndrome is becoming more prevalent. Women drinking large amounts of alcohol (which one source suggests may be 5 units at a time, more than 5 times a month) are putting their babies at risk of this condition.
In fact, the reason given for changing the advice, which used to be that one or two units (such as a small glass of wine) once or twice a week was acceptable, was that the old guidelines were ‘too confusing’ for women. How patronising!
(The complete official guidance is now to avoid alcohol altogether, but if you can’t, to avoid it completely for the first three months and then limit your intake to one or two units once or twice a week. Hmmn, about as clear as a glass of Guinness I think.)
Will tuna be next? Will it be considered too difficult for women to understand that eating tuna more than twice a week is not a good idea because of the levels of mercury in the fish? Will it have to be put on the banned list? And what then? Tea? Can women be trusted not to drink more than 6 cups a day? (This is the level at which there is an increased risk of miscarriage or babies being born with a low birth weight.)
Most women can easily exercise some restraint and stay within safe limits. They don’t need to be dictated to – they need flexible attitudes from those around them.
Issuing a ‘ban’ can pile on the pressure at a time when women are often quite stressed. Research in recent years has indicated that stress can have a considerable impact on the unborn child. A study in Denmark, for example, linked maternal stress during pregnancy (such as job loss, separation, bereavement) to birth defects such as cleft lip and palate and spina bifida.
It also gives women yet another cause for guilt. If something does go wrong in the pregnancy, women may look at any slip-ups they’ve made and pin the blame on themselves. At times of intense grief, feeling to blame can make the situation far worse.
Perhaps even more worryingly, it could gives others – fathers, grandparents, friends and even health visitors – carte blanche to blame the mother when things go wrong. Often, the cause of a miscarriage or congenital defects cannot be established with any certainty. Instead of blame, perhaps what women need at times like those is another cup of tea and some sympathy.
Ó Christine Meadows