Why doctors are alarmed by the rise of drinking during pregnancy

The idea of drinking during pregnancy sounds like a generational punchline: Someone’s grandmother drank beer to fatten her fetus, another had a nightly martini to get a healthy amount of sleep — presumably unthinkable behavior in today’s America. 

Yet after precipitous declines in the last 50 years, rates of alcohol use in pregnancy in the U.S. started climbing upward a decade ago. More than 1 in 8 pregnant adults reported drinking in the past month, according to STAT’s analysis of 2024 government data, making alcohol use a more common national phenomenon than gestational diabetes. Of those who drank, a quarter reported having four or more drinks in one sitting — binge drinking — in the prior month. 

While rates of alcohol use in pregnancy are lower in the U.S. than those of several peer nations, the effects are all around Americans. Alcohol is the key driver of what are, by some estimates, the nation’s top neurodevelopmental conditions: fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, or FASDs.

The exact prevalence of FASDs is difficult to measure, but the most recent federally funded community studies have found as many as 1 in 20 school-aged children may have a disorder caused by prenatal alcohol exposure. By comparison, about 1 in 31 American children has autism, per recent estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Not all fetuses exposed to alcohol have birth defects or go on to develop intellectual disabilities, researchers say. But every person born with an FASD was harmed by alcohol specifically. They worry this point is being glossed over as Americans question the conventional medical advice of avoiding all alcohol while pregnant.