Abstract
Choosing to act within a precautionary paradigm is often the smart choice for pregnant women and for healthcare practitioners and researchers who interact with them. However, during pregnancy precaution is often conflated with inaction. This norm is identified in the literature as ‘better safe than sorry/inaction is better than action.’ I argue that the origin of this norm can be traced to the thalidomide and DES tragedies that mark the beginning of the stigmatisation of both prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceutical use during pregnancy. Conceptualising pharmaceutical use during pregnancy as ‘stigmatised’ is important because it helps explain the distorted perception of risk during pregnancy that arises from the norm of inaction. When reluctance to conduct pharmaceutical research during pregnancy is understood in terms of mistaken risk perception, then new tools of risk communication become available to support, critique and evaluate research during pregnancy.
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