Because God forbid a pregnant woman enjoy an adult pleasure every now and again without someone trying to shame her into giving them all up in the name of the holy baby.
Too much caffeine during pregnancy may increase the risk of miscarriage, a new study says, and the authors suggest that pregnant women may want to reduce their intake or cut it out entirely.
Translation: a poorly-designed study riddled with major methodological problems focusing on women who’ve already miscarried comes to the unsupported conclusion that *the* deciding factor might could possibly have been caffeine, so no more coffee for you, Walking Womb. Don’t complain, either, because we know it’s not so bad:
Pregnant women should try to give up caffeine for at least the first three or four months, said the lead author of the study, Dr. De-Kun Li, a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, Calif.
“If, for whatever reason, they really can’t do it, think of cutting to one cup or switching to decaf,” Dr. Li said. “Stopping caffeine really doesn’t have any downside.”
Um, yeah.
Listen, I know a little bit about quitting caffeine, as I’m in the process of doing it right now. There are indeed downsides, starting with the miserable headache I had for two days running, followed by a low-level headache that has lasted for another three days. I see little point of doing it if you’ve pretty much missed the window during which it might possibly make a difference before you even realize that you’re pregnant. It’s a lot of stress, what with caffeine being an addictive substance. And in the end, it’s a tossup as to whether the stress or the addiction itself worse for you, especially if you’re only doing it for a short period of time and only because someone’s told you to do it for the health of your fetus.
Except for the fact that that someone has made this recommendation because they found a little correlation in one questionably-designed study, have not measured what amounts of caffeine might possibly have an effect, if any, and have decided anyway that because you are a uterus on legs, that you cannot be trusted with anything less than total abstinence, regardless of how you feel about the matter.
It’s the same story with any number of other bits of food and drink, such as alcohol, raw fish, soft cheeses and the like. You know, the kind of things that pregnant women have been enjoying for centuries without necessarily turning out mutant babies.
The message given to pregnant women nowadays, though, seems to be that they’re mere children themselves, so they can’t partake of adult pleasures, and while smoking, drinking to excess and taking hard drugs is pretty unquestionably bad for both the fetus *and* the mother, nobody knows how much is dangerous, how much is safe, and so on. So the recommendations seem to be that the pregnant woman has to quit absolutely everything that she may enjoy, and that she can’t be trusted to have any of this stuff in moderation. And god forbid she might decide to partake in public; women’s bodies are public property already, but a visibly pregnant woman really gets it bad. Bartenders and waiters may refuse to serve her alcohol or sushi, strangers may decide they know what’s best for her (and they’ll be sure to tell her).
In the end, though, all of this abstinence may not make a difference, at least when it comes to preventing miscarriage:
Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and epidemiology, at Columbia University Medical Center, had reservations about the study, noting that miscarriage is difficult to study or explain. Dr. Westhoff said most miscarriages resulted from chromosomal abnormalities, and there was no evidence that caffeine could cause those problems.
“Just interviewing women, over half of whom had already had their miscarriage, does not strike me as the best way to get at the real scientific question here,” she said. “But it is an excellent way to scare women.”
She said that smoking, chlamidial infections and increasing maternal age were stronger risk factors for miscarriage, and ones that women could do something about.
“Moderation in all things is still an excellent rule,” Dr. Westhoff said. “I think we tend to go overboard on saying expose your body to zero anything when pregnant. The human race wouldn’t have succeeded if the early pregnancy was so vulnerable to a little bit of anything. We’re more robust than that.”
Really, you’d wonder how we survived all these millenia if you listened to the pregnancy-scare people.
h/t Louise.