No wine for the pregnant

Picture courtesy of Jose Torres

Apparently it is now illegal to sell alcohol to pregnant women in parts of America. Yes, I am well aware that our culture is slowly but surely being swallowed up by the culture of Uncle Sam, that our own Aussie uniqueness is being overtaken by the red, white and the blue and that another blog dedicated to an American theme is not needed. But of course, I write whatever takes my fancy and today it is the movement of the western world into a complete nanny state.

Drinking alcohol is bad when you are pregnant, we all understand that, we are not complete idiots who need laws to tell us what the right thing to do is in pretty much every circumstance. But as Jim Jefferies says, we have to walk as slow as our slowest person. Apart from an intrusion on our own moral judgement and apart from having another law that exists only for the really dumb, there are a few problems with this late night law.

picture courtesy of Izor Simonovioe

 

A woman would have to look pregnant for a bar person to refuse to sell them alcohol. But what if the person reserving the right to serve alcohol to a pregnant woman got it wrong? What if Cloe was indeed not knocked up but had been knocking herself around in the bottom of a biscuit tin after her relationship bottomed out? Should the filling out of her bottom and tummy mean that she is not served alcohol, and by god she needs to drown her sorrows after the bastard broke her heart for the final time. And what if Meredith really is pregnant but is able to order an entire bottle of Yellow because she insisted to the bar person that, no she is not pregnant, just getting fat after the rowing machine in her living room conked out. Are they taking bar people aside for secret classes on how to identify who is pregnant and who is fat? Not all women get that lovely rounded tummy that looks like they swallowed a basketball. It’s easy if a woman is heavily pregnant and looks heavily pregnant, no mistakes can be made here.

This brings us to our next problem. If a woman is heavily pregnant the chances of her getting the energy to lift a full glass of wine let alone get off the couch and into a bar are slim to none. So the chances of these women being in a bar in the first place makes the law a little redundant. And if this poor fatigued and feeling awful pregnant woman, by some miracle, got an energy rush that allowed her to get up, get dressed and get down and dirty would then she would have to wade through a sea of dirty looks from people who do not approve so it would hardly be worth the energy required to move. May as well ruin your babies’ brain development and get tanked in the comfort of your own couch.

And what about all the “bad” things that pregnant woman in the 70s did? They ate nuts, lettuce, deli meats, cuddled their pets, smoked and drank. They even rode in cars without baby carriers and rode bikes without helmets. Kids from the 70s seem pretty normal. Those pregnant women didn’t spawn a generation of underdeveloped simpletons. There is an entire generation of kids who survived this madness.  On the flip side, with all the laws and regulations and dirty looks reigning pregnant women in, does this mean that the kids born today are going to be some sort of uber human? Will the kids born of previous generations be stupid in comparison?

It seems as though freedom of choice is an illusion. People need to be free to make their own choices, even if they are very very stupid.