More un-denormalisation.

Hot on the heels of a positive character smoking on TV comes more bad news for the Righteous. Best they sit down for this, because it seems that the news for pregnant women is not only that alcohol might not boil their unborn babies alive in their own wombs but it might even be beneficial.

New evidence has emerged that pregnant women who indulge in one glass of wine a day in their first trimester may have better behaved children than those who abstain from alcohol or drink heavily.

In a study of more than 2300 mothers, Perth researchers found pregnant women who drank light to moderate amounts of alcohol had babies with fewer emotional and behavioural difficulties.

But fear not, Righteous types, because...

The team from the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research set the "moderate" consumption limit at one alcoholic drink a day.

Pardon me for asking, but if the findings are that light to moderate consumption correlates with fewer emotional problems in the children down the road and a moderate amount is just one drink a day, then what the fuck is light consumption? One every other day? One a week? Having a full Shiraz by your side all day long but only inhaling the fumes? I ask as a non-drinker with Y chromosomes and therefore no personal axe to grind as regards to drinking during pregnancy.

And also cheering the Righteous is this:

... study leader Dr Monique Robinson advised pregnant women to stick to national guidelines, which recommend expectant mothers abstain from alcohol, and to speak to their doctor.

She said that child behavior was "just one of many outcomes that might be assessed with regards to alcohol consumption during pregnancy".

"While our study found light drinking during pregnancy was not associated with increased risk for the child, national guidelines recommend the safest choice is to avoid alcohol once the pregnancy is known."

Pardon me again, but don't women frequently conceive and not know about it right away? I've known women who said their cycle was pretty irregular and assumed they'd get the first hints if they fell pregnant from throwing up rather than being late. Even the regular ones could expect a couple of weeks or so of the oven being on before realising there's a bun in it, and if they also enjoy alcoholic drinks will almost inevitably have a few sherbets while their poor child baby foetus embryo zygote gets pickled with them.

Oh, the humanity!

Actually, this is kind of the point.

Dr Robinson said the research would help alleviate any guilt for women who had drunk alcohol before they found out they were pregnant.

"Women may be drinking alcohol in small amounts prior to recognition of the pregnancy and we feel these data highlight that it is unlikely that this has harmed their unborn child's mental health," she said.

On top of that it's worth noting that as always correlation doesn't prove correlation, and no mechanism has been suggested by which a glass of splosh a day for the first three months after the drunken root on the kitchen floor that got you that way in the first place will help little Jonny or Joanna concentrate in class and keep their room tidy. Maybe light to moderate drinkers could be relatively higher earners and more able to get their sprogs in good schools or some other effect. Or that women who drain a bottle of meths every night are likely to become hopeless derros who just can't look after a child. Pure speculation on my part but all I'm really saying is that this study has found nothing more than a statistical connection that need not necessarily have any medical or physical connection at all.

I suspect the long and short of it is that getting completely off your dial every night to the point that you hospitalise yourself with alcohol poisoning is very likely to be a bad thing for unborn babies, which is obvious enough to be somewhere in the fucking Saville Report. But the good news is that a few vinos is not going to ensure that your baby will be born unable to stand, incapable of speech and with no control of it's bodily functions beyond a tendency to sit screaming in its own filth. The bad news is that you know that's going to happen anyway, so you might as well enjoy a nice red and spend the next few months making up cravings to send your other half up the wall.