The Pregnancy Police : These Days, Mothers-to-Be Are Likely to Get Orders, Not Just Advice, From Complete Strangers
Want a sip of wine? A bite of sushi? A little jog? A long hot bath? And you’re pregnant? Don’t do it! they shriek. Not in your condition!
They may not know you, but they know what’s good for you. And they’re not afraid to tell you. Their favorite baby gift is advice--mostly unwanted--about everything from the caffeine in your coffee to the height of your heels to the MSG in your moo goo gai pan.
The pregnancy police have arrived.
A generation ago, pregnant women puffed cigarettes and sipped martinis in sublime ignorance. But that era is gone, and with it, some say, went privacy.
“You get this feeling that once you are pregnant, you become public domain,” says Barbara Korsch, former chief of general pediatrics at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles. “And more and more, people seem to be identifying with the fetus (instead of) the mother. . . .”
When marketing consultant Deborah Werder was about six months pregnant, she attended a gala reception for a major client. “Everyone was toasting with champagne. Everybody but me. Nobody would give me any. Nobody understood. I wasn’t going to drink the bottle. I just wanted enough for a toast.
“First, no one would offer it, so I had to ask. And they refused! Finally, I just wanted it out of principle, but I sounded like I was begging: ‘Can’t I please have I glass of champagne?’ And, of course, then they all wondered ‘Why is this so important to her?’ ” says the 34-year-old Wisconsin mother of two.
At issue is whether strangers have the right to tell pregnant women what’s best for them. Not even the medical profession is in complete agreement on what is hazardous.
Although the surgeon general advised pregnant women a decade ago not to drink, there was no convincing evidence then, nor is there now, that an occasional serving of liquor causes birth defects. Still, some doctors advise against all drinking during pregnancy, while others suggest no more than one drink a day.
That has not stopped many well-intentioned observers from trying to keep pregnant women from bellying up to the bar. Last March in a Seattle suburb, two cocktail servers tried to convince a pregnant customer that she really did not want the daiquiri she had ordered.
First, they asked for her ID. Then she was asked twice if she would prefer a nonalcoholic drink. Finally, one of the servers ripped a warning label off a beer bottle and put it on the woman’s table with a helpful “In case you didn’t know.”
Both servers were fired but achieved hero status during their ensuing talk-show appearances. Although the offended customer has kept her name out of the spotlight, Leslie Clubb, who was with her at the table, says publicity surrounding the incident caused the woman “more distress than any drink could have.”
When Kathleen Ryan, a pregnant photojournalist, sat down recently at an Italian restaurant in San Antonio, the waiter invited Ryan’s dining companion to have a special wine with dinner. “Then he looked at me and said, ‘I’ll get you some milk,’ ” says Ryan.
After dinner, the waiter “strongly suggested” decaffeinated cappuccino for the mother-to-be. “My doctor told me there was no need to change my lifestyle,” sighs Ryan. “But try telling that to the rest of the world.”
“The spirit of the age favors the moralist and the busybody,” Lewis H. Lapham suggests in a recent essay for Harper’s magazine. “It seems that everybody is forever looking out for everybody else’s spiritual and physical salvation.”
The temptation to look out for the next generation can be irresistible. “It used to be believed that unborn babies couldn’t feel anything and had no rights,” says Korsch. “Now we can look inside the mother with ultrasound and other advanced technology to actually see the fetus.
“Once when I was pregnant and crossing the street,” recalls Korsch, “the light turned as I was halfway across. A man yelled out from his car, ‘How dare you cross in that condition!’
“We used to look at a pregnant woman and see a pregnant woman,” says Korsch. “Now we look and see the baby inside. People take up against you as sort of a container.”
Interest in prenatal health has blossomed in recent years: Many states require warning signs in public places, and warning labels appear on cigarette packages and beer bottles. Doctors now know that virtually everything a pregnant woman eats, drinks or smokes crosses the placenta and reaches the fetus. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that women avoid “anything known to be harmful” and substances whose effects are unknown during the first trimester.
An Orange County medical writer recently stopped by an electrical store for supplies to fix a lamp in her home. “The store owner asked what I was going to do with these items, and when I said I was going to fix a lamp, he didn’t want to sell me anything. He said, ‘Oh, no, not in your condition. You could be electrocuted,’ ” said the pregnant writer. “Gosh, I thought, a man could be electrocuted just as easily.”
And when Jette Davis of Altadena walked into a lumber supply store a month before her due date, she wasn’t given the chance to say what she wanted. “Before I could even state my business, the clerk started to lecture me: ‘What are you doing here in that condition? Does your husband know you are out of the house?’ ”
In most of these cases, the concerned citizens were men. And that may be significant, says Korsch, who is also a Menninger Clinic-trained behaviorist. “There is a whole tradition of men not empathizing with women in areas where they have no personal experience. They can be very judgmental about women’s behavior.”
Recent studies have shown that men’s lifestyles might play a greater role than once thought in prenatal development. For example, some research suggests that alcohol and cocaine use by men might contribute to low birth weights and birth defects. But women, Korsch says, will “always, always blame themselves. The guilt is always there.”
When White House correspondent Ellen Warren was pregnant with her first son, she was covering the John Hinckley trial and smoking a lot of cigarettes and drinking a lot of coffee and Diet Coke. “I was under heavy deadline pressure, and when everybody kept saying, ‘Stop! Stop!’ I felt like, hey, tell me something I don’t know. My own internal guilt was eating me up as it was.
“I wasn’t nearly as offended by those comments about my behavior as I was by presidential candidate Jesse Jackson putting his hand on my pregnant stomach and saying in front of a large group of people, ‘Ellen, what have you been up to?’ ”
Two years ago, a Gallup poll found that 48% of respondents agreed that a woman who smokes or drinks during pregnancy should be held liable for any ill effects.
But in May, the Iowa Senate balked when asked to legislate pregnancy. Lawmakers turned down a bill that would have empowered police to ticket pregnant women caught drinking alcohol in restaurants or bars.
Yet the popularity of pregnancy police increases when it comes to more dramatic cases of “fetal abuse.” Drug-addicted and HIV-infected babies have raised the public consciousness as well as the public ire about society’s responsibility to protect the unborn.
During the last four years, 60 to 80 criminal cases in at least 19 states have been brought against pregnant drug addicts, according to health research groups, who note that very few have been successfully litigated. In 1989, a 23-year-old Florida cocaine addict became the first to be convicted of “delivering” drugs to her unborn child. And last spring, a pregnant cocaine user was ordered confined under guard at an Illinois drug-treatment center until her baby was born.
But as the debate continues, some women’s advocates are trying to put the controversy in perspective.
According to Lynn Paltrow, senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s reproductive-freedom project, the emphasis on women’s pregnancy behavior is misplaced. The outrage should be focused on the inadequacies of the health-care system, she says, and “not on mothers for misbehaving or taking drugs. . . .
“It’s not a crime to do something that could potentially harm the fetus, whatever it may be--whether it’s changing your Kitty Litter or getting too much exercise or staying up too late at night or being addicted to illegal drugs. If that were true, then every pregnant woman would be a criminal suspect from the moment she conceived.”
