Department of Health Management and Policy, University of Michigan and Departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Psychology, Wayne State University, MI, USA
Received 6 July 1999; in revised form 11 October 1999; accepted 7 November 1999
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ABSTRACT |
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INTRODUCTION |
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SOCIAL PROBLEMS |
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In the USA alcohol has been a regularly targeted social problem since the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the colonial era when per capita alcohol consumption was four times higher than at present and drunkenness was commonplace (Gusfield, 1963; Levine, 1978
, 1983
), alcohol was hailed by Puritan clerics such as Cotton Mather as the Good Creature of God (Levine, 1983
). Two centuries later, the Good Creature had become symbolic of deep rifts in American society and was rechristened demon rum. The first anti-drinking reform movement occurred in the 1830s1850s when the poverty and disease of Irish immigrants was attributed to their liquor consumption. The next occurred in the 1880s 1910s, when problems of nascent industrialization such as poverty, the disintegration of family life, rising crime, and mental illness, were attributed to the influence of saloons, which were also the gathering places of the second great wave of immigrants. The current anti-alcohol/drug crusade, which attributes rampant crime and the deterioration of inner cities to a breakdown in public morality abetted by alcohol and drug use, began in the 1970s as a reaction to the turbulent 1960s (Engs, 1997
) and intensified in the early 1980s, when the war on drugs' was launched. In its wake, grassroots organizations such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) emerged, and many states raised their legal drinking age and lowered their blood-alcohol level (BAL) criterion for impaired driving (Engs, 1997
). This new wave of morality was heralded in the media as America's new temperance (Newsweek, 12/84; Time, 5/85), the sobering of America (Business Week, 2/85) and America: New Abstinence (Fortune, 3/85) (quoted in Reinarman, 1988
).
Concurrent with the reinvigoration of the temperance mentality in American life was the emergence of a new social problem: the victimization of children (Best, 1990). The problem of child neglect/abuse, reflected in the battered child syndrome, was first described in the medical literature in 1962 (Kempe et al., 1962
), and was broadened in the 1970s to encompass not only physical battering, but emotional, sexual and mental mistreatment as well. In the course of this evolution, child abuse and neglect became another symbol of America's moral decay (Best, 1990
). It was within this dual context of the new temperance zeitgeist and the concern about the victimization of children prevailing in America that FAS emerged as a social problem in the 1970s, evolved into a moral crusade by the 1980s with its disturbing images of children wounded (Greenfeld, 1989
) or bruised before birth (Steacy, 1989
), and became transmogrified into a moral panic characterized as child abuse in the unborn fetus' (Apolo, 1995
) in the 1990s.
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BREAKDOWN IN PUBLIC MORALITY |
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The early construction of drinking during pregnancy as a social problem shared many of the same ideologies as those underlying the crusade against drunk-driving, most notably a focus on individual, personal responsibility for lifestyle choices' and a belief in the power of broad-based public education campaigns to change behaviour (Reinarman, 1988). However, in the case of FAS, much of the impetus behind the emerging crusade came from the biomedical community (Abel, 1984
). An example of moralizing about the tragic disorder of FAS and personal failing was an article in the Journal of Dentistry for Children, which described a despondent mother who consumed alcohol during her pregnancy allegedly lamenting If only I had known, a regret, the author stated, that occurs all too often but need not if pregnant women would only learn, that life is not a beer commercial (Waldman, 1989
, p. 435). Other biomedical experts voiced breast-beating recriminations. A common theme was that the dangers of drinking during pregnancy were well known in Biblical and Greco-Roman times (Abel, 1984
, 1997
), implying that if we had only paid attention to the bitter lessons of the past, the modern tragedy' might have been avoided. Physicians, writers and theologians' had written about the effects of alcohol on the fetus since Biblical times' intoned Hill and Tennyson (1980), who then chastized modern society with the inclusive moral lapse of failing to heed the wisdom of our forefathers ...' (p. 177). The authors concluded with a statement from a temperance tract dating to the 1860s that said it still holds true today that parents are responsible for their children's infirmities, deafness, blindness and idiocy' (p. 198).
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THE CRUSADE |
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In the USA in the years following the Surgeon General's warning, several state and local governments mandated point-of-purchase warnings about drinking during pregnancy, and federal, state and local governments embarked on public education campaigns to alert all pregnant women to the potential dangers of drinking (Abel, 1984). These campaigns culminated in 1988, when the USA became the first (and still the only) country to adopt legislation requiring an alcohol warning label on every can of beer and bottle of wine and spirits mentioning the potential dangers of drinking during pregnancy (Public Law 100690, 27 USC 201211). By the beginning of the following decade, the crusade had turned into a moral panic, when in 1990 Wyoming became the first state to charge a pregnant woman who was drunk with felony child abuse (Holmgren, 1991
).
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MORAL PANIC |
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FEVERISH PUBLIC CONCERN |
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Concern was also fuelled by the Seattle group through a subtle broadening of the problem. The comment that no case of FAS had ever been reported in a human being with a negative maternal history of ethanol use (Clarren and Smith, 1978) carried the implication that FAS could occur as a result of any amount of drinking. Although first described in 1973 as a condition related to maternal alcoholism, by 1978, the danger of FAS was now linked to any amount of drinking during pregnancy (Clarren and Smith, 1978
), and this in turn carried the implication that the problem was far greater than could be imagined: FAS ... resembles an iceberg with the bulk of the problem out of sight and of indeterminate extent (Poskitt, 1984
). The emotional rhetoric in the biomedical literature was quickly picked up by the American mass media. Articles in newspapers and magazines introduced alleged cases with headlines such as An innocent inherits the anguish of alcohol (Dawson, 1992
), Pregnancy, alcohol can be a deadly mix (Star-Tribune, 1992
), Drinking devastating to unborn (King, 1991
), Kids pay for prenatal drinking (Snider, 1990
), Children pay the ultimate price for a drink (Wilson, 1998
), Prescription for tragedy: alcohol and pregnancy stack deck against baby (Seattle Times, 1996
) and The tragic inheritance (Theroux, 1989
). The most trenchant description appeared in Michael Dorris's 1989 best-selling book The Broken Cord, an account of his experience raising an adopted son with FAS. The book brought the disorder to national attention and was made into a film for television.
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EXAGGERATED ESTIMATES |
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Popular media reports of FAS have likewise exaggerated the extent to which the syndrome is increasing in frequency, with claims such as the Rate of alcohol-injured newborns soars' (Chicago Tribune, 1995) and the percentage of babies born with health problems because their mothers drank alcohol during pregnancy [had] increased sixfold from 1979 through 1993 (New York Times, 1995
). However, since in 1979 FAS was still a new condition and most doctors did not recognize it, this sixfold increase is more likely to represent an increase in the identification and reporting of cases, and not in incidence. These media stories were based on a report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC; 1995a) of the US Public Health Service. However, in the original report, the CDC noted that it had included not only diagnosed cases of FAS, but also any indication of excessive drinking, under the rubric of noxious influences. Not only was the vagueness of this category not mentioned by the media, but neither was an accompanying report the CDC issued on the same day (CDC, 1995b) stating that only a small portion of the medical records they examined that were coded for FAS actually met the criteria for a rigorous case definition; that is, there were many false positives for FAS. Three years later, the CDC further invalidated its earlier report when it recognized that not all women who drink heavily will produce children with FAS' (CDC, 1998). In other words, the noxious influences' were not always noxious'. The earlier sixfold increase had in fact lacked validity.
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BIOMEDICAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP |
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Subspecialists in virtually every field of medicine responded to the moral fervour and the new funding incentives with a predictable announcement of newly discovered clinical attributes of the syndrome. These new conditions were heralded as a new feature associated with fetal alcohol syndrome (Azouz et al., 1993), a new symptom not previously ... described in connection with fetal alcohol syndrome (Adebahr and Erkrath, 1984
), an underemphasized feature in FAS (Crain et al., 1983
), and heretofore unreported symptoms' (Johnson, 1979
). Among these new symptoms were such isolated and rare anomalies as supernumerary mammillary bodies (Adebahr and Erkrath, 1984
), steep corneal curvature (Garber, 1984
), bilateral tibial exostoses (Azouz et al., 1993
), tetraectrodactyly (Herrmann et al., 1980
), clitoromegaly, hirsutism, and liver dysfunction (see Abel, 1990
). Other articles raised the spectre of cancer, with reports of an association between prenatal alcohol exposure and Hodgkin's disease and leukaemia, as well as a formidable litany of tumours in the brain, liver, kidney, and adrenals (see Abel, 1990
). More often than not, such reports were based on single isolated coincidences. The epidemiological evidence of an association between prenatal alcohol exposure and any of these conditions has never been demonstrated; most of the new features' are so atypical they have only been seen in a single case of FAS and in fact are excluded from the most recent American diagnostic paradigm for FAS (Stratton et al., 1996
).
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DISTORTION OF AETIOLOGY |
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The biomedical research community which provided these estimates had a certain pragmatic interest in framing the issue in terms of low thresholds because the greater the national panic, the higher the research budgets to do something to combat this national health problem. It is therefore not surprising that the estimated thresholds were, and continue to be, routinely misrepresented through the obfuscation of citing average consumption over a particular time period, rather than disaggregating the specific kinds of drinking patterns that are associated with FAS. For instance, a woman who has one drink a day every day and a woman who binges once a week, consuming six or more drinks at once, both average seven drinks a week. Yet each of these drinking patterns represents potentially very different levels of alcohol exposure for the woman and her fetus. Since peak blood alcohol levels (BALs) reached per drinking episode are a crucial factor in FAS (Abel, 1999), the average drinks' measure distorts the relationship between alcohol and teratogenesis and muddies our perceptions of risky drinking. Only a handful of researchers, such as Jacobson et al. (1993) and Ernhart (1991) have been forthright enough to clarify this issue. For example, in evaluating children whose mothers drank during pregnancy, Jacobson et al. (1993) placed the threshold for alcohol-related cognitive damage to children at an average of one drink a day during pregnancy, but emphasized that the effects they had observed were due to much higher exposure than indicated by this average. Since none of the mothers studied drank every day, they acknowledged that the average did not represent a typical drinking day. Instead, the women who drank above this "average" threshold exposed their infants to a median of six drinks per occasion (p. 181). Similarly, Ernhart (1991) noted that a woman in her study who consumed an average of one drink a day during the course of her pregnancy, confined her drinking to the first 3 months of her infant's gestation, when she drank a gallon of wine, and a half case of beer, every Friday and Saturday evening. After that she did not drink for 3 months. Nevertheless, because drinking was averaged over the longer period, the woman's drinking appeared to be very low.
This bias in the medical literature has been magnified in the popular press and in lay pregnancy manuals and public health educational materials. Although many researchers recognize the significance of binge drinking as a risk for FAS, the distinction between number of drinks per drinking episode and number of drinks per week or month has been largely glossed over in public discussions of FAS, which tend to present any type of alcohol consumption as dangerous.
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DEMOCRATIZATION |
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FAS has not been immune to democratization. When the disorder was first described in 1973, Jones and Smith and their co-workers took pains to emphasize its universalism by reporting that the eight unrelated children they had observed belonged to three different ethnic groups ... (Jones and Smith, 1973). However, FAS has never been an equal opportunity birth defect (Abel, 1995
); its inseparable handmaidens are poverty and smoking (Bingol et al., 1987
; Abel, 1995
). What Jones and Smith and their colleagues did not emphasize was that the eight children, and virtually all the other children they and others subsequently examined, were seen in hospitals serving a predominantly lower socio-economic status population. Groups whose members suffer disproportionate poverty, such as Native Americans and African Americans, are especially prone to this disorder. In the Yukon and Northwestern areas of Canada, the rate for FAS and partial FAS has been estimated at 46/1000 for Native children compared to 0.4/1000 for non-Native children, a 1000-fold difference (Asante and Nelms-Matzke, 1985
). In the USA, the rate of FAS among low income populations is 2.29/1000 compared to 0.26/1000, for middle- and high-income populations (Abel, 1995
). Despite the empirical evidence, grass roots organizations, such as the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (NOFAS) continue to espouse the view that FAS is a threat to all pregnancies. When NOFAS was founded, for instance, its executive director stated: I think a lot of middle-class and upper-class women don't know that occasional use of alcohol during pregnancy is dangerous' (Information Access Company, 1991
).
While it is true that drinking occurs across all social categories in the USA, FAS is undeniably concentrated among disadvantaged groups. The very large socio-economic differences in FAS rates (Able, 1995) are not due to differences in the number of alcoholic women among the poor compared to the middle classes. In fact, drinking is much more common among the middle and upper classes than among the poor (Abma and Mott, 1990; Caetano, 1994
; Abel, 1998a
). Instead, the reason FAS occurs predominantly among poverty stricken women is that they experience, or are characterized by, many more permissive factors, such as smoking and poor diet, that exacerbate the effects of alcohol (Abel and Hannigan, 1995
). Since FAS cannot be divorced from poverty, insisting that FAS crosses all lines' perpetuates the problem by situating it solely within an alcohol context instead of the wider context of poverty.
Democratization disguises the extent to which moral panic about FAS may in fact spring from much deeper social unease about changing gender roles and about class and particularly race differences (Armstrong, 1998a). Many legal commentators in the USA have noted that the recent rash of prosecutions of pregnant women for substance use and purported fetal harm are concentrated among poor and most often minority women (Roberts, 1991
; Gomez, 1997
). The moral panic over FAS likewise may reflect social divisions typically invisible in American society, particularly rifts over what constitutes a good mother.
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IMPLICATIONS |
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However, the moral panic over FAS in the USA, unlike earlier periods of social preoccupation with alcohol, is driven as much by gender division as by class or socio-economic divisions. Although its sufferers appear to be concentrated among the poor, the public image of the condition as a universal one resonates with issues of social control and gender. As Armstrong (1998a) has noted in an earlier analysis, the diagnosis of FAS arose at a period of intense gender agitation in the USA, and thus reflects widespread social unease about the conflict between the traditional maternal role of women and their efforts to embrace more diverse roles in modern society.
Historically, moral entrepreneurs have mobilized moral rhetoric when they have felt social norms threatened by outsiders or newcomers to society; in other words, as response to social deviance. Moral panics may arise when social elites seek to preserve or defend their status in the social hierarchy (Gusfield, 1963); alternatively, moral panics may serve to deflect political attention from intractable social problems, or inequality inherent in the social structure (Hall et al., 1978
). As Plant (1997) has noted in the British context, the moral panic ignited by FAS in the USA served the further purpose of diverting attention from social inequality and displacing blame for poor pregnancy outcomes to individual mothers rather than social circumstances. Women, in their child-bearing and child-rearing roles, have always been held particularly responsible for the future of society. The case of FAS illustrates that this is still true.
The moral panic ignited by concern over FAS, with its exaggerated claims, especially regarding the dangers of social and moderate drinking, and its universalization, has important implications. Reporting averages' as if they represented a typical drinking day has led to a widespread perception among the American public that even one drink during pregnancy is dangerous. There have been countless reports of visibly pregnant women who were harassed by indignant strangers when seen to be drinking in public; likewise, there are accounts of morally righteous waiters and barstaff who have refused to serve visibly pregnant women alcoholic beverages. Even some American clinicians have fallen prey to this misunderstanding (Abel and Kruger, 1998), which has caused some women to become so anxious that they have considered termination of their non-threatened pregnancies so as to avoid giving birth to a child with FAS (Armstrong, 1998b
; Lipson and Webster, 1990
; Koren, 1991
).
If we are to reduce the incidence of FAS, we must first accurately comprehend the problem at hand and abandon the rhetoric of moral panic. There is no epidemic of FAS births. Nor is social or moderate drinking among the almost 4 million pregnant women who give birth annually in the USA a risk factor for FAS. However, the risk is considerably greater for the relatively small number of women who abuse alcohol on a regular basis, and it is even greater for those women who have previously given birth to a child with FAS and continue to drink (Abel, 1988).
While government has a moral duty to alert citizens to potential dangers (Abel, 1998b), public education measures, such as warning labels, have no noticeable effect in reducing drinking during pregnancy (Hankin, 1996
), as evidenced by the fact that more, not fewer women, are now drinking during pregnancy than before the appearance of the labels (CDC, 1997). Such broad-based prevention efforts are doomed to fail, because women who give birth to children with FAS are not simply a variant of the general drinking population. A small proportion of women of child-bearing age, especially those who are most disadvantaged by poverty, bear the greatest burden of risk for FAS. If we are going to reduce the incidence of FAS, we need first to know who those women are, as well as what puts them at risk. If we hope to reduce the incidence of this birth defect, we must reconstruct the problem not as a moral panic, but as a moral imperative to find and help those women most at risk of adverse outcomes.
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FOOTNOTES |
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