No tuna. No soft cheeses. No pâté. No shellfish. No soft boiled eggs. No mayonnaise. No coffee. No uncooked meat. No cured meat. No blue cheeses. No prewashed salads. No junk food. No hair dye. No mobile telephones. No hot baths. No saunas. No cigarettes. No breathing of other people’s cigarettes. No evil thoughts. No over-excitement. No lifting and carrying. No petrol fumes. No touching the soles of the feet. And above all, above everything else, No Alcohol.
It’s astonishing, really, that the human race continues to survive when one considers the number of things a pregnant woman is supposed to avoid for fear of endangering her baby.
I remember when I was pregnant the first time round, trying to buy an unpasteurised cheddar sandwich in a posh west London cheese shop. The man behind the counter took one look at my bump and launched into a lecture about the danger to pregnant women of all unpasteurised cheeses of any kind.
“I know doctors say you shouldn’t eat soft cheeses,” he tutted, “but I personally wouldn’t recommend hard cheeses either.”
We English do so enjoy telling each other what not to do. We love nothing more than a chance to click our tongues: whether it’s over the Chelsea-tractor drivers, the pie-and-chip school mums, the pavement bicyclists, the skinny models — or a pregnant woman trying to buy herself a ruddy sandwich. It’s always fun to remind people when they’re doing things wrong.
A friend of mine, seven months gone, had her wine glass taken away from her at a party recently by an unknown man who, presumably, thought he was acting for the public good. Another friend, similarly disposed and sitting in a wine bar, was subjected to a lecture from a complete stranger about the evils of passive smoking.
I’ve just finished being pregnant for the third time. At some point in the early stages of this last pregnancy I was sitting in the doctor’s surgery — slumped, actually, sick as a dog, barely able to speak for fear of barfing.
The doctor listened wearily as I moaned about my morning sickness. She gazed, unmoved, at the pre-vomit saliva that was dribbling down my chin. Her lack of interest was kind of dispiriting. But then she came to life. She leant forward, suddenly completely rapt. “Now that you’re pregnant,” she murmured earnestly and apropos of nothing, “are you going to stop drinking?”
She told me about a recent study that had found a link between mothers who’d drunk even a single glass of wine during pregnancy and their daughters developing breast cancer in later life. I was too ill to argue about it. But the study struck me as pretty meaningless even then. No doubt there’s also a link between mothers who played hopscotch and their daughters developing breast cancer too. It’s just that no one’s been bothered to look for it yet.
In any case, this week pregnant women (not me any more, I’ve a very nice healthy baby, thank you — and yes I did drink once the vomiting had stopped) are being hectored with yet more tenuous links and alarmist statistics about the dangers of drinking during pregnancy.
The children’s charity Tommy’s has popped up with the “truly shocking” news that one in 20 pregnant women admitted to regularly exceeding the recommended alcohol limit (of 1-2 units once or twice a week), and that one in four pregnant women drinks up to that limit every week.
They tell us that because there “is no proven safe level of drinking in pregnancy” it is therefore possible that even moderate drinking, as enjoyed by one quarter of all pregnant women, might lead to something called “foetal alcohol spectrum disorder”, which might possibly lead to some children being small for their age or to their having “behavioural problems” — which I think in ordinary English means it might lead to their sometimes being a bit naughty.
I’m over-trivialising perhaps. But then they’re over-dramatising, and nobody ever seems to complain about that. Incidentally, a new study has just found that one-third of children with attention deficit disorder may have been exposed to smoke before birth, or to lead afterwards. So there’s one more thing to worry about. No standing near traffic.
Pregnant women are inundated by so many ludicrous rules, so many scaremongering statistics, how can we possibly be expected to take all of them seriously? Obviously it’s mad and dangerous to drink to excess, and the harm inflicted on babies by drunken mothers, before and after birth, is horrible and well established. We all know it.
But this puritanical drive for total abstinence isn’t about excess, it’s about the English love for tongue-clicking. It’s about demonising something that is patently harmless, since 25% of mothers are already doing it and have probably been doing it since time began, to no noticeable ill effect on the population. We haven’t yet, so far as I’ve noticed, been overtaken by miniature delinquents. On the contrary, the human race grows taller and heavier every year.
I can already hear the bossy brigade grinding their teeth while they read this. I — and the rest of that “truly shocking” 25% of women who continue to drink in moderation to lighten the ineffable boredom of pregnancy — are no doubt the sort of women who don’t deserve to have children. Well, too bad. We’ve got them. And we love them. And they’re doing just fine. So, please, go and find someone else to tut over.
- Since this government seems to know so much better than we do about how to bring up our own children, you might think, when it comes to those children for whom it is solely responsible, that it could provide us with a shining example of how to do it right.
But no. While ministers jostle to keep our children longer at school, while the government prosecutes us for taking them away on foreign holidays during term time, while it legislates on whether or not we should smack them, constructs databases on how we are feeding them, weighs them and fingerprints them, advises Muslims to report on them, and finally tells us how to seat them in the back of the car, we discover that of all the parents in the land, the government is the least doting and the most incompetent.
A shocking report into the state of the care system revealed last week that half of all prisoners under 25 have been in care, that a third of all homeless people were brought up in care, and that a quarter of all girls in care have fallen pregnant before they leave.
There were no figures provided regarding their intake of vegetables, but no doubt that is pretty lamentable, too.
