Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Discourse
This is an interesting tiktok that the algorithms gave to me today.
Transcript
[note: I do not endorse all of the contents of this post.]
I'm gonna tell you about a disability that no one talks about even though you definitely know somebody that has it. Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. It used to be called Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, now people have a really hard time with the new name but just think of it like autism spectrum disorder - it's a spectrum disorder meaning everybody's symptom's looks different. FASD is an umbrella term meaning it covers several diagnoses that all relate to pre-natal alcohol exposure.
How much alcohol can cause this disability? We used to think a lot - we used to think this was a disability only for children of alcoholics.
Now science is showing us that even small amounts of alcohol early in pregnancy before a woman even knows she's pregnant can cause this, which means numbers are way higher than anyone imagined.
We used to say that FAS affected 0.1% of the population. Then 1% of the population. But now, a very large study done by UNC in 2018 showed that 1.1-5% of the population could have an FASD. But wait, that's only the conservative estimate - the less conservative estimate was 3-10% of the population.
So let's cut this number down the middle and say that's 5%. How much is 5% of America? 5% of America is 16 million people, which is larger than the population of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago combined.
This means that FASD is 2.5 times more common than autism, but why don't we talk about it? It's because it's stigmatized. We don't wanna talk about something that we think lays "blame" somewhere, but here's the thing, I don't think anyone drinks with the intention of harming a child.
There are three reasons why pregnancies might be alcohol exposed:
They didn't know that they were pregnant. 50% of pregnancies are unplanned, most women don't know until 4-6 weeks, you don't know.
Your doctor said it's okay. A ton of doctors say that.
You can't stop. You can't just tell someone to stop drinking, you have to give them the tools to stop drinking.
If you've watched this far, then good job for you. You're probably wondering what FASD looks like. Much like ADHD and autism, FASD is an invisible disability, and in fact has many of the same symptoms as ADHD and autism.
FASD is just another form of neurodiversity1. There's a ton more to talk about here but I'll add them in future videos so stick around if you want to know how I know that you know someone with FASD.
If one alcoholic drink early in pregnancy is enough to cause Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), then probably something like >80% of all humans throughout history has had it.
Of course, a correlation to nature or tradition doesn't imply goodness. Most people throughout history had malnutrition too, and it should be self-evident that our efforts towards eradicating malnutrition globally is unequivocally moral.
Still, it's always interesting to me when something that used to be the default is now pathologized. In case you were curious, in the west, we didn't realize that alcohol could lead to birth defects until the 70s, and presumably those who were pregnant weren't taking much care to drink less before that.
(I want to note that the debate around drinking during pregnancy isn't settled, even now. In the comments of the tiktok you see people complain about all their relatives or posters they see online that insist on continuing to drink while pregnant. But I'm pretty sure I know which side is going to win out in the long run.)
In the future we might see other sorts of features becoming classified as "birth defects" and pathologized. It's not hard to imagine the construction of something called Fetal Adiposal Spectrum Disorder and an industry around it for treating people whose mothers were obese during their pregnancies. Or Fetal Stress Spectrum Disorder for people whose mothers were overly stressed. Maybe a Fetal Toxoplasmosis Spectrum Disorder. The list goes on.
Or maybe before we get to that point, we'll realize that pregnancy is something best left to the experts or artificial wombs and that it's barbaric to do it ourselves. It'll become as taboo to carry your own child as it is to care for your own dead without the use of some professional mortuary service.
After that realization, how long is it going to be before we realize that having childrearing defaulting to bioparents is unethical and children should all be reared by an expert centralized body? There are a million ways to fuck up a child. And have you seen the abuse stats? In the US, in 2015, 15% of children and youth aged 0–17 years old underwent maltreatment by a caregiver, with 5% undergoing physical assault. Surely we can do better than this.
Perhaps one day there will be a study that says that the effects of child abuse costs the government ten trillion dollars a year ((Actually, it turns out that someone had already written that paper. The annual economic burden was $2 trillion.)) , and maybe in time that study will be used to justify the collection of all children by the state (except for the children of the very rich, who seem to always be exempt from these kinds of things).
One way to look at all this (the correct one, I think) is to say that we are trading in toxic and outdated traditions for better practices that benefit us all.
I was born after we started making these tradeoffs, and every trade that we've already done seems more than reasonable. I benefit from them, too. I take birth control, I appreciate living in a society that doesn't ostracize me for my non-mainstream religious beliefs (I'm not religious), and I'm certainly not going to resist a cultural opposition to pregnant people drinking.
Still, I hesitate when looking at the tradeoffs that I see looming on the horizon. My heart illogically wants to draw the line in the sand, for us to progress to here and no further. But there's no real argument to make for that.
I actually hate the usage of this term here lol since the creator of the tiktok obviously would like to reduce the number of people born with FASD, and neurodiversity as a label comes with the belief that that all neurotypes are normal and should not be exterminated↩