By Shannon Snow

The seventeen-year-old boy is almost a man, yet he retains a preadolescent gawkiness and a small, slim build. His facial features are somewhat distorted.

Although he is in tenth grade, he reads at the fifth grade level; he has shown no progress in learning abilities for several years. The boy has problems with memory, concentrations, and following directions. His IQ identifies him as borderline retarded.

Perhaps the boy’s most crucial deficit is lack of judgment. He does not learn from his mistakes, he cannot anticipate consequences, and he does not know right from wrong, despite constant reminders. Caes-in-point are abundant: he does not realize he has to wear a coat in cold weather, and will venture outside in just a tee shirt if not reminded. Food has to be concealed because he reasons that if one cookie tastes good, the whole box will taste great. Stealing is a common problem despite disciplinary action; neither the wrongness of the act nor the consequences are understood.

Even the boy’s positive qualities are not without a down side. He is socially friendly and loving and affectionate with family members. However, he is impulsive. "Friendliness" sometimes extends to inappropriate touching. His nature is to be easily led, and other teenagers take advantage of this. Real friendships are rare. He likes to help around the house and does some repetitive chores dutifully, but has to be reminded about the simplest things – to turn off the water, to shut the refrigerator door.

The boy’s outlook for the future is not promising. Having reached an educational plateau and lacking in common judgment and reasoning, there is little hope of his making an independent life for himself. Without lifelong supervision, his basic survival may be in question.

What’s wrong with this picture? Obviously, something serious. Yet even the most competent medical and behavioral professionals sometimes fail to recognize it. Is it a genetic condition? A birth defect? Did something happen to the boy before he was born? Was he the victim of abuse? Does he have brain damage? In reality, all of the above are true. The 17-year-old boy has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), the result of his mother drinking while she was pregnant (The Most Common…).

The FAS child may not appear retarded and has good verbal skills. This can make diagnosis difficult. The effects of maternal drinking, however, are devastating. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome will permeate this young man’s life and prevent him from being happy, productive, and accepted. His alcohol-impaired brain will deny him basic pleasures: meaningful relationships, understanding and imagination. He is, in effect, "a swimmer without a shore" (The Most Common…).

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is defined as the manifestation of specific growth, mental, and physical defects associated with the mother’s high levels of alcohol use during pregnancy (Table of…).

At least 5,000 babies are born each year with FAS and 50,000 children show symptoms of fetal alcohol effects (FAE) (Definition of…). "FAS is the single greatest cause of mental retardation in the U.S. today," says Douglas A. Milligan, M>D., a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the University of Kentucky. The bad news? There is not cure for FAS. The good news? FAS is 100% preventable.

"Alcohol is an inextricable and largely inescapable part of American culture. W see sexy beer commercials on television, hear humorous spots for alcoholic beverages on the radio, and see arty liquor ads in magazines. The promotion of alcohol is all around us and has been a part of life for thousands of years. We entertain and relax by drinking, use alcohol to enhance conviviality and set the mood for romance. Many women drink socially for a number of reasons. But on things is certain: when a woman is pregnant, drinking is one of the most potentially harmful things she can do (Cooper)."

According to the National Pregnancy and Health Survey sponsored by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institutes of Health, an estimated 4 million women gave birth in the United States in 1992, and of these women, nearly 19 percent used alcohol. FAS is becoming a more and more frequent problem in the U.S. today. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, tell us this may reflect a true increase in the number of infants with FAS, or an increase in the awareness and diagnosis of FAS in newborns by physicians (Why Drinking…).

Children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome have, at least, the following characteristics:

• small size and weight before or after birth
• specific facial appearance with the following groups of signs:
  - microcephaly or small head size
  – small eyes and/or short eye openings (palpebral fissures)
  – underdevelopment of the upper lip with flat philtum (upper lip ridges) thin upper lip
• involvement of the brain with the signs of delay in development, intellectual impairment or neurologic impairment (Definition of…).

There may also be effects on other body systems like the heart, spine, and limbs (Definition of…) people with FAS may have hyperactivity, learning and attention difficulties, lower intelligence, developmental delays and motor problems (Fetal Alcohol Syndrome). Unfortunately, this disease will continue to have these difficulties throughout their entire lives (Fetal Alcohol Syndrome). "Children with FAS have a very hard time in life. A lot of these teenagers and adults get I trouble with the law an d end up in prison as a result of the many mental problems associated with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome," says Marsha Jackson, director of the Women Services at the Davis North Hospital in Layton, Utah.

We often take for granted abilities we have, like the simple task of tying our shoes. To a child, or even an adult, with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, tying their shoes may be a daily challenge that we don’t even think twice about. Things we do, day in and day out, an FAS child may never have the opportunity to do.

There is no cure for these effects of alcohol on the developing fetus. That is, once the damage has been done there is not way of eradicating it. Individuals with FAS continue to have social and cognitive problems with some of the problems changing with age" (Burgess). Is all this worth giving in to a beer or two while sexual active?

Marsha Jackson explains how it doesn’t matter so much the amount of alcohol consumed during the pregnancy, but the time it is consumed. "It depends on what moment the mother drinks in the pregnancy. It depends on what is happening with the fetus. It could be one drink or it could be one hundred drinks." Although it is rare, some mothers will not deliver babies with any Fetal Alcohol Effects even when they have drank during their pregnancy. It depends n the mother and the developing fetus, but the mother cannot afford to take that risk.

Mothers may hot be ‘alcoholics’ in the stereotypical sense, but usually have abused alcohol during at least part of the pregnancy (What is FAS)…).

A commonly asked question is: how much alcohol can I drink and not hurt my baby? Even small amounts of alcohol can be harmful. Because no amount can be considered safe, it is strongly recommended that pregnant women avoid all alcohol during pregnancy. Drinks with alcohol in them include beer, wine, hard liquor and wine coolers (Why Pregnancy…). Not only are these drinks harmful, but medication can also cause damage to the developing fetus. Cough syrups have a very high percentage of alcohol in them and need to be watched carefully by the expecting mother.

Another frequently asked question is: can my baby get Fetal Alcohol Syndrome even if I don’t drink alcohol every day? Yes, in fact, most women don’t drink alcohol every day. Instead, they drink only on special occasions, such as weekends, holidays or parties. When they do drink, some women have five or more drinks at a time. This is called "binge drinking." This pattern of drinking is very dangerous for your baby, because it quickly makes the level of alcohol in your blood very high. So, even if you don’t drink every day, you may put your baby at risk for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (Why Pregnancy…).

Douglas Milligan explained that "Approximately 67% of women in the U.S. drink at some time during pregnancy and there is no accepted safe level of drinking. The signs of FAS are more common in heavy drinking, but most of the studies define heavy drinking as two drinks a day. Even a single binge in pregnancy has been associated with learning disabilities" (Cooper).

Heavy alcohol consumption (three or more drinks a day) and/or one or more first-trimester alcoholic binges has been shown to raise the risks of global development to the fetus (Burgess). Doing this during the third trimester places the unborn child at risk for lowered intelligence and lifelong behavioral problems. Attention problems, memory deficits, and motor skills problems have been associated with habitual social drinking by the expectant mother throughout the pregnancy (Burgess).

Even though mental retardation does not occur very often, minor Fetal Alcohol effects can be present with only drinking one or two drinks a day. Researchers have reported that exposure to even small amounts of alcohol (on to 2 drinks per day) during pre-natal development can lead to impaired attention and many learning difficulties (Riley).

Your baby can’t say no, but you can. When a mother drinks, the unborn child drinks as well (What is FAS…). FAS results from the toxin effect of alcohol and its byproducts on the developing brain. The alcohol enters the baby’s bloodstream through the placenta. Doctors aren’t sure when alcohol becomes a danger. However, they do know that women who usually drink two or more drinks a day or binge have the greatest danger of delivering babies with FAS (Cooper).

It may take the motor four or five drinks to get drunk but it only takes a very small amount of alcohol to get the baby "drunk." The same amount of alcohol that the mother intakes is also taken in by the baby despite its size so it takes a shorter amount of time of the baby’s blood alcohol level to get high.

Not only is a FAS baby hard to handle and tough to raise, but is very costly also. Costs to the American tax payers is $3231 every year in care, detainment, prosecution, institutionalization and incarceration for the misjudged or under diagnosed FAS/FAE people. The cost to the FAS/FAE person is inestimable, because it lasts a lifetime (Definition of…).

"You make a choice to have a child, and you have a responsibility to make sure that child is as healthy as can be," says Joan Korb, Racine County’s assistant district attorney. "It’s a moral obligation" (O’Neill).

There are many more problems that occur when a mother drinks either intentionally or not intentionally. Anne Marie O’Neill tells a story of a lady who will pay the price of drinking while being pregnant.

"When the Westside lounge in Racine, Wis., opened for business at 2 p.m. on March 16, Deborah Zimmerman was already waiting outside. Within minutes of sitting down at the bar, the then 34-year-old waitress had knocked back her first Blind Russian—a mixture of vodka, Kahlua and Bailey’s Irish Cream. Half way through her second, she leaned over and confided to bartender Dennis Peterson, "I want to tell you a secret. I’m going to have a baby." Instantly, Peterson swept away her cocktail and replaced it with a 7Up. The damage had been done long before (O’Neill).

By the time her mother, Donna, fetched her from the bar and checked her into St. Luke’s Hospital later that afternoon, Zimmerman, who was in fact nine months pregnant, was in a drunken frenzy. Swearing and ripping fetal heart monitors from her belly, she threatened to leave the hospital. "If you don’t keep me here, I’m just going to go home and keep drinking and drink myself to death," she told surgical aide Julie Maher. "And I’m going to kill this thing because I don’t want it anyways" (O’Neill).

Zimmerman drank neither herself nor her baby to death that Saturday afternoon. Instead, at 10:27 that night she gave birth to a 4-lb., 6-oz. Girl, whom she named Meagen. But Deborah Zimmerman may yet become a case study in the annals of American jurisprudence. For her child’s blood alcohol level was 0.199 grams per deciliter—almost twice the level for a legal drinking of intoxication in Wisconsin. And Zimmerman now finds herself the first woman in the U.S. charged with the attempted murder of her fetus for drinking throughout her pregnancy—even though the baby lived. For that, she faces up to 40 years n prison (O’Neill).

All because on that March day, doctors attending Zimmerman delivered an infant with a flat face, small wide-set eyes and a diminutive body, telltale signs of fetal alcohol syndrome—a condition that can cause heart defects, brain damage and, in severe cases, death. For Joan Korb, the combination of the infant’s condition and Zimmerman’s threats was enough to bring charges. It’s time to "start holding women accountable for the harm they do to their unborn children," explains Korb" (O’Neill).

If you are sexually active or plan on having a baby in the near future, do not take that drink of alcohol. Not even one. You cannot take it back. The effects of a FAS baby are irreversible. The guilt of knowing you possibly could have raised a normal baby will never go away. Don’t rob an innocent child of leading a normal, healthy life. Since the baby cannot control the mother’s drinking habits, it is up to the mother to decide whether or not this child will be able to succeed in life. These babies have a right to lead a normal life. If you are thinking about getting pregnant, remove alcohol from your life completely until the pregnancy is over. If you are sexual active, abstain from drinking. The best way to treat FAS is to keep it from happening. The best think you can do is quit drinking when you are still thinking about getting pregnant. If you get pregnant quit drinking alcohol and try other beverages, like water or fruit juices. Your doctor may be able to help you stop drinking before it hurts your baby. If you are addicted to alcohol and you don’t think you can stop drinking, abstain from a sexually active lifestyle. Alcohol and pregnancy do not mix. You cannot have one with the other.

Although the mother is the one who directly affects the outcome of her baby since what goes in her moth goes straight to the baby, many other people play a huge role in influencing the decision of whether the mother drinks or not during her pregnancy.

Many of you males probably think that FAS does not concern you in any way. Unfortunately, in concerns you in every way. If there is a chance of pregnancy with anyone you are close to, whether it be your wife, your girlfriend or even a mother, temporarily removing alcohol from your life will also help the mother to stay away from alcohol. Be supportive and encourage an alcohol-free lifestyle. Your influence can make a huge impact on whether or not the mother decided to use alcohol during her pregnancy. Know the facts of FAS and the preventative tips. It just may help another child to lead a normal, healthy life.

Friends or anybody that is close to the expecting mother also play a huge role. A true friend will stop drinking also while the mother is pregnant. You also, can be responsible for a baby with FAS. By removing alcohol from your life, it makes it a lot easier for the mother to also remove alcohol from her life. A true friend will not allow a mother to be put in any type of situation where alcohol is accessible, alone. Have a "designated sober company." You have to be the one who stays sober with the expecting mother at a party where everyone is drunk. It is your responsibility to make the decision easy for the mother not to drink.

What would happen if you were to cut off the hands and feet of a one-year-old baby? Everyone would be outraged! You’d be put in jail, possibly put to death for killing a human being! Everybody would hate you and you’d be listed with playground mass murderers. So what is the difference? Why not outrage here? Drinking while pregnant puts a baby’s life at risk. If you think that it’s not your place to intervene with the drinking mother, then you’re all guilty! There are countless opportunities where you can help a mother abstain from drinking; such as the bartender giving an expecting mother a soft drink instead of alcohol. It is your place to step in and prevent another case of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.