Drinking and pregnancy

All my sister-in-law wants is an icy, salty margarita. She's not a big drinker. She's a 31-year-old stay at home mom, but everyone needs a drink now and then, especially when you have two screaming toddlers running around, she told me. However, she is pregnant with her third child and it's taboo for her to indulge in alcohol.

But is it really that bad if my sister-in-law has a few drinks while pregnant?

A new Reuters article suggests that occasional binge drinking while pregnant won't cause birth defects, but the research is not conclusive. A recent review of 14 studies, said that binge drinking throughout a pregnancy does stunt growth, and cause birth defects and brain development problems. However, little substantive evidence of binge drinking once and a while during pregnancy causes problems such as miscarriage, stillbirth, abnormal birth weight or birth defects.

"When pregnant women report isolated episodes of binge-drinking in the absence of a consistently high daily alcohol intake, as is often the case, it is important to avoid inducing unnecessary anxiety as, at present, the evidence of risk seems minimal," according to the researchers in the Reuters article.

This comes as somewhat of a relief to me and my family. My sister-in-law, well, actually most pregnant women think that the tiniest thing will hurt their baby. Don't eat this, do eat that, the list goes on and on. And while I'm certainly not encouraging drinking while pregnant, I find this research encouraging because it let's pregnant women breathe a little easier. If my sister-in-law craves a margarita, then she should just drink it and not feel terribly guilty about it.

While the link between alcohol and pregnancy may not be a myth, here is top 20 list of pregnancy myths.