Study shows casualties of GOP's War On Women

[Kamakazie Sith]

Problem is, this is not an exact science. Thirty years ago doctors would allow pregnant women to drink a glass of wine every once in a while ; Two hundred years ago pregnant women would consume beer for breakfast. People were still born and the increased risks were only noticed after we began doing actual science on the matter.

So if you define "has tiny amount of alcohol in her breath" as child abuse and throw the lead brick of the law at her, you are almost certainly endangering the child-to-be more than if you just let the mother have the goddamned glass of wine every two weeks. It is a very narrow definition of responsibility backed by the rather clumsy tool of state repression, a thing that would be analogous to holding people responsible (via arrests and trials) for not adhering 100% to accepted scientific consensus on any other potentially harmful issue. Did you handle someone water in a bottle that contains BPA? Is your store's air conditioner being sterilized every week? Do you use antibacterial soap in your restrooms? No? Handcuffs for you!

That approach solves no problems and causes plenty.

To clarify I'm not advocating throwing pregnant women in jail for having a glass of wine or light drinking. I realize that there is no evidence to support that light drinking is harmful to a developing child.

However, I was talking about drinking alone. I'm talking about engaging in harmful behavior while pregnant and that harmful behavior should be in the context of my discussion with Terralthra. We were talking about a female that consumed alcohol, decided to drive, and got into an accident. Had she not been pregnant she still would have received a DUI because the alcohol impaired her ability to operate a motor vehicle safely. The fact that she did so while pregnant changed the charge to Child Endangerment - DUI. **I'm assuming that she was at fault for the accident.**

[PeZook]

Her alcohol level was below the legal limit, from what the OP's article states.

[Agent Fisher]

It doesn't matter if your BAC is below the legal limit, if you have any sort of intoxicant in your system, and you are deemed at fault for an accident, you get hit with DUI, cause even if you're below the legal limit, you're still impaired in the eyes of the law.

[Terralthra]

As KS pointed out, charging with DUI is at the officer's discretion, as well as legal limit. People can be sufficiently impaired such that they shouldn't be driving without being above the legal limit, and from the most recent article I linked regarding this incident, it appears she may have been, since it was a solo accident from her running off the road, but without further details (e.g. a police report), that's difficult to judge.

[Kamakazie Sith]

Even in cases of neglect the state doesn't (well, okay, shouldn't - I don't know how it acts in the US) immediately go from "nothing" to "arrest and try the mother". Where I live, there's an entire intermediate apparatus which aims to first, determine the causes for apparent neglect (like material hardship, lack of education or time) and address them, then monitor the situation to see if things improve or not, and the response becomes gradually heavier if it doesn't.

When we had our boy, we had a couple visits from a nurse who gave us a few tips on how to best care for him, filed a report about the conditions etc, and every couple years we're supposed to check in to a doc to monitor for problems. But if we're three months late for the checkup, we won't get arrested - it's just not that big a deal.

It's nowhere near "There was a half empty bottle of wine on the table, arrest the mother immediately". The negative reinforcement are administrative fines, not police and arrest.

As far as I know I've never heard of the extremes you're talking about here. In my experience no mother has ever been arrested for drinking while pregnant or being late to a checkup. I'm not really sure why you think this might be taking place in the United States. Terralthra, talks about pregnant females being arrested for substance abuse. Here are a few examples the language used involving alcohol. I searched through all instances of alcohol and I did not find one that suggested occasional use was used as grounds for arrest.

permitting state authorities to take a woman into
custody if it is believed that she is pregnant and demonstrates “habitual lack of self control”
in the use of alcoholic beverages or controlled substances)

authorizing civil commitment of women who are “pregnant and abusing alcohol
or drugs”; Minn. Stat. Ann. § 253B.02, subd. 2 (West 2011) (authorizing civil commitment
of persons who are “chemically dependent,” defined to include “a pregnant woman who has
engaged during the pregnancy in habitual or excessive use for a nonmedical purpose” of drugs
or alcohol).

I will add that there are some cases that should be looked into further to determine the severity. One that caught my eye is "These
include a pregnant woman who had been in a location while pregnant that
exposed her unborn child to dangerous “fumes that permeate in the air,”

What was her intent? What was her charge? In most states if you're attempting to kill yourself you can be committed so context is very important in all of these and the report doesn't give us much context like the one I quoted above.