Pregnant women don’t need a blanket ban on drinking. They need the facts | Jennie Bristow

Giving mothers-to-be advice with no scientific basis is patronising and coercive. Women have the right to see the evidence and make their own decisions

The past 50 years have brought some huge victories for women’s reproductive choice. Access to contraception and abortion allowed sexually active women to avoid or terminate a pregnancy, enabling them to decide whether and when to have children. But these significant gains are limited by both old and new constraints. Women’s access to abortion is limited by law and remains contingent on the prevailing political mood. And women who continue their pregnancies find themselves subject to increasingly shrill and contradictory guidelines about how that pregnancy should be conducted.

Related: Warning pregnant women over dangers of alcohol goes too far, experts say

These new rules involve bowing to expert advice regardless of your own feelings, knowledge or circumstances

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2qv9ZBW