Youth | Pregnant?

Why Not Drink During Pregnancy?

• When you drink, so does your baby.
• Alcohol is carried through the placenta by your blood stream. 
• This can cause permanent brain damage to your baby. 
• This damage is called Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD).

(Source - ALAC website.)

Alcohol is harmful to the foetus and a mother drinking alcohol between the 3rd and 9th week of pregnancy puts their child at risk of having some form of FASD.
This may be low birth weight which is not caught up, or their child may have learning and behavioural disorders, which will make them:

• less able to focus or learn from experience;
• more easily frustrated;  
• quick to anger; and 
• unable to understand the consequences of their actions.

One of these effects is called ADHD.

Images of 6-week old infant brains

Image courtesy of Dr. Sterling Clarren, University of Washington (1986).