Do you guys just look for an excuse to be snarky? Michael Phelps, as ridiculous as he is, is probably shirtless because he’s practicing skin to skin contact with his child, something that promotes intimacy with fathers and their babies. Christ.

The Arcata Eye’s old police blotter was hands down the best. Plenty of wacky calls and characters, but even the mundane ones would be published as haiku or limericks. Sadly they stopped updating it a few years ago: http://www.arcataeye.com/2013/03/arcata…

It’s completely rational for me to say, “Fuck you!” The state of my uterus is not your business.

Oh FFS - that’s a lot of projecting going on there.

WTF is with all these ostensibly pro-choice commenters who are all, “BUT WHY TAKE THE UNKNOWN AND PROBABLY TINY RISK OF A SINGLE DRINK?!?!?! AND MAYBE IT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL OR WHATEVER!?!”

I’m not even touching the alcohol issue here, and cleft palate might have a genetic component, but there are numerous drugs on the market that can cause cleft palate as a birth defect. I’m on one right now, and have been strongly advised to take extra precautions to not get pregnant. I’ll probably stay in the greys,…

Yeah, damn women for thinking their lives and choices matter.

Zero responsibility? You mean the women who bear ALL the responsibility for the human life and are often denied access to reproductive care? And will be blamed for every thing that happens to the child she may raise alone? Which women are the ones taking zero responsibility because it seems to me we bear…

“And the next thing to deny pregnant women will beeeee........

OH NO A SLIPPERY SLOPE MADE OF WINE I CANNOT TURN AWAY

“And FYI, if someone is blackout drunk, chances are ZERO that they leave the bar, so by default they can’t drive.”
What? Blackout drunk doesn’t mean you blacked out, it means you don’t remember what is happening.

“Drinking any amount of booze while pregnant can cause serious birth defects”
Making a statement as fact that has no basis in science is also fucking stupid

That’s your value then. Keep it to yourself.

But that’s precisely what it is. General recommendations only consider the worst possible scenario as the norm. If you are talking individually with your doctor who KNOWS you, the recommendation is probably different (it was for me). Frankly, most observational studies show no difference between a woman who abstains…

The only link I found between oral clefts and alcohol was for mothers who binge drink (5 or more drinks in a sitting) during early pregnancy. But, sure, it makes sense to assume that the glass or two of wine that your friend had is the reason her child has a cleft.

Cleft palate and lip palate clefts are not diagnostic of fetal alcohol syndrome. Try again.

So what you’re saying is you had friends who drank occasionally while pregnant, who had children with birth defects, and you immediately blamed your friends for drinking, not considering for a moment the possibility of a genetic or other environmental cause.

So if one were to take the time to read the studies (and there are a ton) fetal alcohol spectrum disorders are normally caused by binge drinking, and binge drinking in the second half of the first trimester. There has been no evidence found that light to moderate drinking after the first trimester causes any harm.…

You are not educated on this topic. Educate yourself and try harder next time rather than baselessly talking shit about other women.

It’s refreshing to see this. Once you get pregnant, people treat you as though you have the fragility of an 80-year-old and the naivete of an 8-year-old, and simply can’t make your own informed decisions about your body. Most doctors approve of moderate/infrequent drinking during pregnancy, and it’s really nobody’s…