For more than 50 years, scientists have warned about the risks of drinking alcohol in pregnancy. Recent research has found that a mother’s consumption of as little as one drink a week may affect a child’s brain development, cognitive function and behaviour, and facial shape, while for decades, public health campaigns have repeatedly said that there’s no safe amount of alcohol for mums to drink while pregnant.
“For years now, we’ve been hearing stories from women who said, ‘I never drank during pregnancy, but now I have an FAS kid – and my male partner was a chronic alcohol abuser’,” [Michael Golding, a developmental physiologist at Texas A&M University] says. But such stories often were dismissed as mothers being forgetful, if not outright lying.
Recent research, however, raises an intriguing – and possibly game-changing – possibility: these mothers were right all along.
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The idea that a father’s alcohol consumption before conception could have an impact on the offspring may seem far-fetched. But recent population studies have found that babies whose fathers drank are at a higher risk for various poor health outcomes. One 2021 observational study of more than half a million couples in China, for example, found that the risk of birth defects – including cleft palate, congenital heart disease, and digestive tract anomalies – was higher if the father drank before conception, even when the mother did not drink. Another population study from China compared 5,000 children with congenital heart defects to 5,000 without. Again, while overall risk remained relatively low, it found that babies were nearly three times more likely to have a congenital heart defect if their father drank – defined as having more than 50ml (1.7fl oz) of alcohol per day in the three months before pregnancy – than if he didn’t.
