Pregnancy Just Got Awesome: Study Okays Drinking ‘A Little’ During Pregnancy

Let’s be honest — pregnancy is pretty much a constellation of things that suck. There’s the nausea, the weight gain, the swelling that makes your feet look like overstuffed sausage casings, and to top it all off you can’t even have a drink or your baby will be born with flippers instead of eyeballs. Or something.

However, a new study is claiming otherwise. The study published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and tracked 10,000 children born in the U.K. between 2000 and 2001 for the first seven years of their lives. The children were tested for math, reading, and spatial skills while their parents answered questionnaires on their emotional and social development. Turns out that the kids whose mothers drank a little alcohol during pregnancy were doing just as well as those whose mothers abstained completely, and some of the alcohol-exposed kids scored higher.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that pregnant women should start tapping kegs any time soon. The government still recommends that women “not have more than one to two units of alcohol once or twice a week, and not to get drunk” during pregnancy (to put that in perspective: a  four-ounce glass of wine is roughly one and a half units). Keep in mind, it’s difficult to judge one’s individual limit when it comes to booze, as “one to two units of alcohol” will affect certain people differently.

Bottom line: Imbibing any form of alcohol during pregnancy is potentially dangerous.

H/T + PicThx NPR