Risk or No Risk; Drinking’s Bad, M’Kay?

Aaron Carroll has an interesting post at The Incidental Economist entitled “How we tolerate risk,” which looks at a recent study suggesting that light drinking of alcohol during pregnancy is not associated with developmental problems in mid-childhood. They looked at 10,534 seven year olds and found no difference in developmental problems between kids with mothers who drank light amounts versus those who did not drink at all.

Carroll looks at this and sees issues with how we evaluate risks in this country. (He notes the shutting down of Boston to catch two guys.) He’s not wrong, but in this particular case, I see our culture’s desire to advance its moral sensibilities under whatever pretext is handy.

Because the issue is drinking and because we have a strong temperance streak in our culture, the fact that there is some minimal, but poorly understood, link between light drinking and developmental challenges, pregnant women are told “no drinking, ever, while you’re pregnant.”