The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), self-described as the U.K's largest provider of abortions, has recently released a statement positing that advising women not to drink during pregnancy is "more sexist than benign."
“We need to think hard about how risk is communicated to women on issues relating to pregnancy. There can be real consequences to overstating evidence or implying certainty when there isn’t any,” Clare Murphy, the director of external affairs at BPAS, said.
While it has been firmly established that drinking during pregnancy can cause severe lifelong problems for the mother's baby, the organization has insisted that stigmatizing women who drink during pregnancy is more harmful than beneficial. They believe that women who have had only a few drinks during pregnancy may be pushed to abortion out of fear that their baby has been caused irreversible damage. BPAS did not present an accompanying study which identified this as being a prevalent trend among expectant mothers.
BPAS focuses primarily on providing abortions
Though BPAS focuses mainly on providing abortions, though they do offer other services such as miscarriage care, and fetal anomaly care. Miscarriages are one of the potential side effects of drinking regularly during pregnancy.
Included in the statement was testimony a feminist professor at the University of Kent, Ellie Lee, which read:
As proving ‘complete safety’ [of drinking in pregnancy] is entirely impossible, where does this leave pregnant women? The scrutiny and oversight of their behaviour the official approach invites is not benign. It creates anxiety and impairs ordinary social interaction. And the exclusion of women from an ordinary activity on the basis of ‘precaution’ can more properly be called sexist than benign...
BPAS maintains that there is "no evidence" that drinking "moderate" amounts of alcohol during pregnancy causes any long-term complications for babies. This is contrary to the advice of the Government of the U.K, as well as the Surgeon General of the U.S. Even the author of a study, which attempted to find that there were no negative effects of "moderate drinking" during pregnancy, in the end advised that women not drink at all while pregnant.