17/40 – Who’s that Girl?

I am worried about the girl on the wine bottles… Have you seen her? It’s not a very clear picture – you can’t see her face – but she is clearly pregnant, and she is not supposed to drink wine. Or beer, or gin (just checked my bottle of Gordon’s). At all. People must be very concerned that she doesn’t realise she can’t have it; ordinarily you’d expect an adult woman to be able to make the decision herself, rather than needing a picture on a bottle to remind her and everyone around her. So the effect it has on her must be fairly awful, poor thing, because there is no picture or mention of children, or people with health problems, or people taking strong drugs which mean they can’t drink – just her. 

But, as I said, her picture isn’t very clear. So you may have ordinary pregnant women, most of whom don’t drink very much at all when pregnant, but who have an occasional glass of wine – which they look forward to and enjoy very much (even if it does give them atrocious heartburn)- feeling like they can’t have it any more, or even have people shouting at them when they do have it (as people are known to do when they see a pregnant woman smoke). And they’ll feel this way even though there is no medical evidence to suggest that the occasional glass of wine causes the slightest bit of a problem.

There is no denying that drinking significant amounts when pregnant is dangerous – it can have terrible and permanent effects on your unborn child. But, and I may be missing something vital here, but I can’t see this picture stopping the tiny percentage of women who do drink to dangerous levels when they are expecting a baby.

Surely this picture of the pregnant girl can’t be directed at all pregnant women? Surely we’re not at a stage where all pregnant women are being treated as mentally deficient, unable to control their impulses to binge drink…. Surely we’re not going that way, are we?