preview

The Effects Of Prenatal Drinking On Children Essay

Decent Essays

The growing up in New Zealand study is a longitudinal study following around 7000 children and their families from across the wider Waikato and Auckland regions of New Zealand. Report one looks at the vulnerabilities and risks for children before they were born. A very interesting finding from this study is found in subsection 7.6 and looks at the maternal alcohol consumption for mothers with planned and unplanned children. The results from the study displayed that while a majority of mother did abstain from drinking by the first trimester as around 89% of mothers in the unplanned group and 85% of mothers in the planned pregnancies group did stop a majority of the number of mothers did continue to drink, Overall drinking throughout pregnancy around 25% of planned pregnancies 35% percent of unplanned pregnancies was reported to have had any were between one drink per week to 20 plus drinks per week. However, it should be noted that only 2 percent of non-planned pregnancies reported drinking this much alcohol.
Prenatal drinking increases the risk for a wide range of catastrophic outcomes. For instance, spontaneous abortion which is where the fetus dies within the first twenty months of gestation. Evidence suggests that this is mostly associated with a mother who induced five more drinks per week but there is no consistent evidence for a mother who drank less. Stillbirth is another devastating outcome and is where the baby dies twenty weeks after gestation, current research

Get Access