It’s common knowledge that drinking while pregnant is an extremely bad idea. The consumption of alcohol during pregnancy will lead to developmental disorders that will drastically alter the livelihood and future of the unborn child in horrible ways. Alcohol in the mother’s blood passes through the umbilical cord and into the fetus, however the processes of removing alcohol from the blood stream are not yet developed in the child. This hampers the developmental process in a number of ways, leading to physical malformations, poor mental development (memory, reasoning, and attention), vision and hearing problems, or even still-birth and death. Ocean Hills Recovery Inc is a drug rehabilitation center in California that focuses on transitioning drug-abusers to what they call ‘sober living’. Keep in mind that alcohol is the most widely consumed drug in the United States, so their services are greatly needed.
No attempts at disguising or denying that the aforementioned problems can be avoided when drinking while pregnant have ever proven to be true. Each drink you take is a gamble as to whether or not you will poison your unborn child. It’s commonly believed that severe afflictions related to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome will only appear if the mother drinks extremely heavily during pregnancy. This implies that the casual drinker, or someone who drinks a safe amount of alcohol, will be unaffected. This is untrue as well. There is no ‘safe amount’ to drink, because the amount that causes these problems is unknown and may vary from person to person. There is no safe time to drink either, because the connection between the mother and child is constant until birth. So nothing at all should dissuade you from sober living in California if you’re planning on having a child. Considering what is at stake, it should be obvious not to gamble with another persons life for the sake of a beverage.