Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome

Abstract

Janet Golden, Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. 240. £16.95. ISBN 0–674–01485–5. For generations women have been drinking alcohol while pregnant. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, physicians prescribed ale, sparkling wine, brandy and other alcohol-based tonics (but not degenerate gin) for all sorts of pregnancy-related discomforts and maladies. We now know that alcohol, not debauchery or disorderly lives, affects the developing foetus and the physical, developmental and behavioural signs of alcohol's teratogenic effects must have been present for all to see. With the long history of drinking while pregnant and its evident results, the ‘discovery’ of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) in June 1973 by a team of researchers in Seattle, USA, is a historical curiosity. Why then? After all, this ‘discovery’ was predated in 1968 when a French paediatrician, Paul Lemoine, described many of the same characteristics in the children of alcoholic mothers, a condition named Lemoine syndrome. This ‘discovery’ was mostly ignored in France and elsewhere. Does another event in 1973 explain the identification of FAS? After all, this was the year of the Roe vs. Wade legal case in which the US Supreme Court made a decision that defined (and limited) a woman's right to decide to end her pregnancy. Whether historical accident or the result of the focus on the foetus brought on by the abortion controversy, the timing of the discovery of FAS would shape its political and cultural meaning. Research documented the poisonous effects of significant and sustained doses of alcohol on the developing foetus, although little of the data supported a link between one or two drinks a day and FAS. Nonetheless, without evidence of a safe level of drinking, pregnant women in the USA were advised to stop consuming alcohol altogether. Women who drank before discovering that they were pregnant now worried that their foetuses were irreparably harmed. FAS became a ‘medical’ justification for abortion, further linking it to Roe vs. Wade.