If we ever meet then I will give you 5% of my life savings as it exists on February 20, 2007.

You could probably find more money in the cushions of your couch though.

I agree that your line of thinking is very simple. The issue, however, is not, so we won't get anywhere if you continue to oversimplify things to the point where a glass of wine holds the same moral weight as a murder weapon.

The men of the Tuskegee experiement might have been potentially harmed from taking penicillin. Was that good enough reason to not give them the informed choice? And, before you jump on me for even conflating, in passing, penicillin with booze, I will ask you to do the research you neglected to do for your earlier post, and discover that red wine in particular has numerous health benefits when consumed in moderate and sensible amounts.

I think we could all also agreee that a relaxed person is in better health than a stressed-out one. Or perhaps there are studies out there where guided meditation and yoga are considered significant contributing factors to heart disease.

No, the argument is that having a drink while pregnant has never been shown to cause any harm, is quite common in Europe (where they do not have higher incidences of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome), yet in Nanny America, any pregnant woman with a glass of wine in their hand is treated as if she were a murderer. It's fucking ridiculous, no matter how high on your soapbox you people want to get. There are a ton of (actual, not the fake internet dudes here) doctors who will tell you the same. There are a many things that are "potentially harmful" to a fetus...why not treat them the same?

Most medical professionals will disagree with you.

Or maybe because drinking while pregnant, for most people, isn't nearly the risk that you've been led to believe. In fact, for moderate social drinkers, it's pretty much not a risk at all.

Fine. Would you prefer if I called it a disorder? It causes significant changes in how a person thinks and makes decisions. It is associated with conscious behavior, but is indicated by people no longer making rational decisions to govern conscious behavior. This is how alcoholism differs from garden variety alcohol abuse and self-medication.

Do alcoholics need to want to get better in order to get better? Yes. The same way schizophrenics must understand that they have a treatable problem, rather than just "suck it up and ignore those voices."

I would also point out that at no point in this thread has anyone advocated getting shitfaced while pregnant. The only advocacy is that we should all calm down a bit, and remember that the mother's body is designed to filter out things that would harm a fetus, and in the vast majority of cases, will do just that. The cases where it seems to have failed are generally when met with an assault of alcohol the mother's body could not filter on its own.

Seeing a woman who has a single glass of wine, and who has been advised by a medical professional that it's fine, and equating them with drunks who have no regard for the child's health doesn't help anything.

Alcoholism is most certainly a disease, and a progressive degenerative one at that. It involves a loss of ability to properly metabolize alcohol and irreversible brain and liver damage.

If I were to quit my tobacco addiction today, my body could start to repair the damage I've done. There is no such recovery for an alcoholic, what damage is done is done and there is no going back. Quit drinking for 20 years, then take a drink and you will be right back where you were before, drunk and bent toward destruction.

So you're just looking to argue for the sake of argument, right?

Pregnant women shouldn't drink because it can affect their unborn children. It's as simple as that. If you aren't hurting anyone but yourself, go ahead and get your stomach pumped. If you're carrying a person inside you, maybe you should be responsible and think of how that binge drinking session could hurt your child for the rest of his/her life.

As people we still have brains and free will. The alcohol doesn't force you to drink it, so it's not a disease. The physical effects of alcoholism might be considered a disease, but drinking itself is not. Saying "I have no choice, I have to drink, I have a disease" is indeed a cop-out.

I fail to see how this differs from standard over-consumption of alcohol. When I have too much to drink...it affects my thinking & decicion making. When I am drunk, my ability to make rational decisions is affected. They are decisions made freely and consciously....but they are my own decicions.

I believe you're referring to cirrhosis...which is a liver disease...caused by the behavior of alcoholism.

Alcoholism is a BEHAVIOR. Cirrhosis is a DISEASE.

since there is no way to know if you are an alcoholic until you try drinking, by your logic no one should drink, ever, because some people will find themselves out of control after they start.

That conflicts with reality. Most things that have extended our lifespan involve people in little white coats telling us what to do based on things we will never understand. Many of them even include things done without our direct permission to the air and water and food to make them safer for us to consume.

Which is pretty fucking meaningless in the scope of this discussion. If there are statistics saying "Alcoholics have a higher FAS rate than non-alcoholics", then you can bet your ass that in that statement, "Alcoholism" is not being defined in the way you are trying to use. It obviously IS being defined simply in terms of drinks taken. Argue about semantics all you want, but the underlying fact that it's the number of drinks and not whether you have some abstractly defined disease which determines risk.

What is the purpose of this article?

Primarily to stir up controversy, it seems. It's some pretty obvious baiting.