Hands off our wombs …and our wine glasses
IT’S only to be expected that a global organisation like the WHO, charged with promoting public health, must deliver the odd sermon from on high about healthy lifestyles and clean living, which – as is the usual habit with these things – is then promptly ignored. But unlike its usual edicts on recommended alcohol consumption that are left to gather dust in GPs’ surgeries across the world, the WHO’s latest anti-alcohol salvo has created quite a stir.
Instead of the usual finger-wagging moralising, the report wades into the choppy waters of nanny-statism and misogyny, reading like a throwback from the Dark Ages when women were victims of their biology and, whether they liked it or not, produced a baby every two years.
Put simply, the WHO has released an astonishing draft alcohol action plan that calls for women of childbearing age to be prevented from drinking alcohol to reduce the incidence of foetal alcohol syndrome.
While not wishing to diminish the severity of foetal alcohol syndrome or the physical and learning problems it creates, the cure is hardly condemning women to teetotalism until they are middle aged.
Firstly, that sounds dangerously like policing women’s wombs and just a few steps away from the chilling regime painted by The Handmaid’s Tale where women are dehumanised as vessels for procreation and a society is built around a single goal: the control of reproduction.
SECONDLY the advice is utterly pointless. There’s no need for women to abstain for 40 years. The birthrate in this country is declining – it’s currently at 1.75 – which means that most women are in procreation mode for a relatively short window, a time when most know quite well to cut down or cut out their alcohol consumption.
If they are too stupid or ignorant or, as is more likely the case, sunk too far in the grip of alcoholism not to do so, then it’s highly doubtful that a leaflet from the WHO or an annual week promoting the dangers of alcohol for fertile women will remove the scales from their eyes. But the directive is also offensive in how it places the blame for foetal health problems on women’s shoulders and reinforces the gender bias in public discourse around pregnancy at a time when science increasingly shows the pivotal role fathers play.
A few decades ago, only women had a biological clock, but men have since been discovered to own one too. A 40-year review of medical literature conducted by Rutgers University in the United States shows that past the age of 45 men found it much harder to get their partners pregnant, even if the woman was much younger. And if alcohol can affect foetal health when it passes through the mother’s bloodstream, it also affects sperm quality and male fertility meaning it’s not just women but men too that GPs advise to stop drinking if they are hoping to start a family.
AMOTHER’S age is a determinant of Down’s syndrome but there is also a link between older dads and the incidence of neurodevelopment disorders like autism. Then there’s the genetic lottery that means that even the two healthiest parents on the planet, a mother and father whose lifestyles are utterly beyond reproach in every conceivable way, can create a severely disabled child who will never be able to live independently. Of course, the fickle finger of fate does not absolve us from doing our best to give babies a healthy start in life but that’s the responsibility of two parents, not just mothers and certainly not at the cost of enforced abstinence for the best years of her life.