can i just say like telling people not to smoke or drink alcohol while they’re pregnant is ableist and classist as fuck and it needs to stop
first off the majority of smokers/substance abusers are from disadvantaged and poor backgrounds or are struggling with mental health issues and they use it as a coping method so to tell them theyre a bad person for doing that is both classist and ableist
the main argument against it is that your child will come out disabled but honestly if that happens so what??? whats wrong with that??? this whole mindset has deep fucking roots in ableist thought process and im fucking sick of it. like. why do you hate people with disabilities lol
okay but if you’re not going to go outside could you at least open a window and let some air in
Am I reading this right?
All yalls kids gonna have fetal alcohol syndrome and my kids are gonna be zooming past them in school
These folks have drank so much of their own kool-aid
absolutely fucking ridiculous
If you do anything while pregnant that you know could be an active risk to your child’s health, could have a negative impact on their ability to navigate the world? Once the child is out of the womb, we’d call that child abuse. Once you’re a parent, you have a responsibility to the tiny person you helped create. If you’re going to carry the pregnancy to full term, yes you need to stop doing certain things, or at least damn well try. My cousin was born addicted because his mother was, and he did nothing but scream endlessly while in withdrawal. If you voluntarily choose put put your child through that, even if they don’t have permanent health repercussions from it, you’re a bad damn parent. And honestly, if your baby is disabled as a result of your refusal to stop doing addictive things, you aren’t going to be able to provide for their special needs because you’ll be too busy accommodating your own desires over what’s best for them, just like you did before. If you really cant quit, you shouldn’t be carrying the kid to full term in the first place.
^^ This exactly. This is not coming from some sort of terrible anti-vaxx logic, where people think that they’d rather have their child die of a COMPLETELY PREVENTABLE disease than somehow magically ‘contract’ autism from a vaccine (spoiler alert in case my derision did not carry through the internet: vaccines do not, have never, and will never cause autism, because that is not how autism works and also not how vaccines work, and furthermore if you’d rather indulge your baseless paranoia than protect your child and those who can’t be vaccinated, you’re a bad parent; the tag ‘vaccinate your spawn’ contains my rants to this effect). The logic of “do not smoke or drink or do drugs while pregnant, OR, if you know you cannot quit your vice of choice, avoid pregnancy” is based on the desire to protect newborn children from preventable problems that can threaten their lives. As mentioned above, children born addicted to a drug suffer brutal withdrawal–fun fact, withdrawal can KILL adults. Delirium tremens, the last phase of alcohol withdrawal, has a mortality rate of between 5% and 15%. FOR ADULTS. Even with the best medical care possible–and by the way you’ll need to pay for that and, in the US, it won’t be cheap–there’s obviously a mortality rate for addicted neonates. Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) and other related disorders can include problems ranging from mild developmental issues (ADHD or autism-like symptoms, and as someone who manifests a nice dose of the former with an option on the latter, I can confirm it ain’t a picnic) to severe neurological problems (actual damage to the central nervous system or brain which…um, do I really need to go into detail here). Among other things. I included a nice link to Wiki so you can do your own research.
Hell, if for some reason protecting a kid from preventable life-long problems isn’t exactly your cup of tea, try some self-interest on for size: being on strong drugs or vasodilators (like…well, alcohol) while pregnant can increase the risk of problems FOR THE MOTHER. (We’re going with ‘mother’ here as the generally accepted term for ‘person whose uterus is physically containing a growing fetus’ and I just…I don’t want to hear about it, okay.) Pregnancy is already a risky business, because it demands a total alteration of the mother’s body (more here x, also this is the CDC’s page on pregnancy complications which is actually a little thin on the ground but hey gotta start somewhere). For the love of all that you hold holy, why WHY WHY would you knowingly increase that risk by adding drugs (illicit or otherwise) and/or alcohol to the mix? Christ, it’s recommended that pregnant folks avoid COFFEE so that they don’t mess up the delicate system–in the later months of pregnancy, you’re not supposed to lie on your right side because everything’s so squished by that point and lying in the wrong position can bring on a faint as the vena cava is compressed. See above re: WHY WHY WHY.
So…yeah. No. Honestly? What are you doing? Get clean before you have kids. It’s better for EVERYONE INVOLVED and also for my blood pressure.