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By Janet Golden
A iteration has handed in view that a doctor first spotted that ladies who drank seriously during pregnancy gave start to underweight babies with traumatic tell-tale features. ladies whose personal moms loved martinis during pregnancy now misplaced sleep over a bowl of rum raisin ice cream. In Message in a Bottle, Janet Golden charts the process Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) during the courts, media, clinical institution, and public mind's eye. lengthy thought of innocuous while pregnant (doctors even administered it intravenously in the course of labor), alcohol, whilst ate up through pregnant girls, more and more seemed to be a powerful teratogen and a urgent public healthiness challenge. a few clinicians urged that girls easily average alcohol intake; others, notwithstanding, claimed that there has been no demonstrably secure point for a constructing fetus, and referred to as for entire abstinence. at the same time the analysis received recognition and labels seemed on alcoholic drinks caution pregnant girls of the risk, FAS started to be de-medicalized in a few settings. progressively more, FAS emerged in proceedings as a practicable security for individuals charged with critical, even capital, crimes and their claims have been rejected. Golden argues that the response to FAS was once formed through the fight over women's really new abortion rights and the escalating media frenzy over "crack" infants. It used to be more and more used as facts of the ethical decay stumbled on inside of marginalized communities--from inner-city neighborhoods to Indian reservations. With each one reframing, FAS grew to become a foreign money traded via politicians and political commentators, legal professionals, public wellbeing and fitness pros, and advocates for underrepresented minorities, every one pursuing separate goals. (20050611)
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Extra resources for Message in a bottle: the making of fetal alcohol syndrome
Example text
But first Americans had to learn that women, like men, could be alcoholics. After Prohibition, rates of female drinking slowly began to rise, although they lagged behind those of men. In 1940, 38 percent of all adult women drank as compared with 64 percent of men. By 1965 the figures stood at 60 percent for women and 77 percent for men. 23 The evidence suggested that men’s abusive drinking continued to be far greater than women’s. Despite this fact, there was a “cultural preoccu- Framing FAS 45 pation” with women’s drinking, alcohol expert Kaye Middleton Fillmore noted, based on an unproved convergence thesis suggesting that the percentage of women abusing alcohol was coming close to the percentage of men.
38 In the early 1950s, doctors discovered new applications for alcohol in Historical Sightings of Alcohol and Pregnancy 33 their obstetrical practices, as an analgesic and as a tocolytic agent (capable of halting premature labor). Several physicians described the experimental use of intravenous alcohol for relief of pain in childbirth, reporting good results: patients became euphoric, pain was effectively relieved, and alcohol, because it was a food, provided nourishment. Most important, it caused none of the complications that resulted from the use of other drugs for pain relief.
With pressure from women’s groups and the discovery of FAS, more investigations got under way, but the information gap remained wide. 25 Despite the paucity of information, the subject of women’s alcoholism stimulated investigations, public hearings, and press coverage. In a strange twist, the lack of data about women’s alcoholism became evidence of “closeted” drinking. Once portrayed as scantily dressed skid-row prostitutes, female alcoholics began to be imagined as middle-class “lady tipplers” ensconced in their suburban homes, wearing aprons, and hiding their bottles in laundry hampers.