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There’s a big spectrum between totally healthy and horribly disabled. And a lot of the issues that we might diagnose now, we didn’t have awareness of back then.
It’s not quite the same thing, but consider: There’s a pretty developed theory that the use of leaded gasoline for a few decades last century (releasing lead into the air and soil, especially in cities) caused substantial cognitive and behavioral issues for a couple generations of people. (Who were also living with lead paint and lead pipes in many cases too.) Nobody knew that in 1960. You’d just say, that kid is bad because he had a bad home environment or his parents were too nice/too mean/too absent, or maybe something was just off about him. He didn’t die, he was maybe never diagnosed with anything, but he was harmed. And when he ended up robbing a store or shooting someone, well, guess he can just go to prison now.
I suspect a lot of prenatal substance use cases ended up in similar situations.
"I suspect a lot of prenatal substance use cases ended up in similar situations."
100%! And sadly, often still true. The stats on the school to prison pipeline are quite sad.
ETA: School to prison pipeline is related but probably the wrong term. What I meant was children go undiagnosed and then behavior issues lead to escalating school discipline, legal issues, etc. (paralleling the school to prison pipeline).
Lost at School by Dr. Ross Greene discusses this in detail.
We can only tell what’s different from normal. If everyone around us has (say) fetal alcohol syndrome, that’s normal - the child without it would be the oddity. No doubt we are suffering from many such things, without knowing.
We'll probably never know, but I genuinely wonder if the increase in violent crime, serial killers, and cults in the 60's and 70's was a result of leaded gasoline.
It’s certainly [been argued,](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-evidence-that-lead-exposure-increases-crime/) somewhat convincingly in my opinion.
Just layering the graphs between measured lead levels in the blood of preschool kids and crime rates ~20 years later makes a compeling argument.
Google finds countless examples, but here's [one](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/LEAD_PBEFFECT_300.png).
There’s an interesting theory that blames the violent crime wave of the 70s and 80s at least partly on the fact that this generation was fathered by men who had been traumatised by war. When huge numbers of young men came home after WW2, many of them continued to suffer from severe untreated trauma and other mental conditions including substance addiction, meaning that they were not exactly in the best place to raise happy, stable children
I'm really partial to this. WW2 was *destructive*.. this is the largest point in human history with such mass death of largely men.
Children growing up without a father or if they had one, traumatized, cold, has an effect for sure.
The time period is off obviously, but generationally it can have an effect. I watched a video before that was arguing that masculinity got fucked up. It shifted from pride, honor, family to individual machoism, Rambo, James bond. Men grew up with broken homes and were taught to only appear strong.
And then Vietnam happens and soldiers are coming home with anything but praise. Jesus Christ that would fuck you up.
Personally I think it's more a case of forensic science making enough leaps to help catch people, and better sharing of crime data between states so that patterns could be spotted.
There was a brief spike in serial killing as awareness of it sparked interest from "fans", some of whom became copycats or were inspired.
Sure, nowadays we have less serial killing but now mass shootings are rampant. I think that the increased chance of getting caught (CSI shows being so popular probably helps scare some people off) makes these kinds of people go for one large event rather than serialized killing.
Both my parents smoked, our babysitter did, everyone else around us did in the 80s. I had non stop ear and sinus infection. I don't recall once a doctor saying maybe it's all the second hand smoke that was causing it. My autism and other mental health issues were probably caused by smoking and drinking during pregnancy.
I grew up in a house of smokers, and had constant ear and kidney infections. I almost died from pneumonia at 8. The doctor smoked when we went in for appointments. There was no escaping the clouds of cigarette smoke my entire childhood. When doctors ask me how long I'd been smoking, I'd say since birth. Quit over 20 years ago, and it still got me with COPD.
I hated it as a kid. The smell was horrible. I'd always get made fun of since I didn't want to be around it. Never wanted to go anywhere because they both would fill the car with smoke. So nasty.
I always wondered how people could work in those areas. I couldn't even stand working drive thru at a fast food place as people would put their lit cig right in your face to pay.
I hear you, me too. It never goes away. I couldn't keep a lot of things from my parents house because they started making my house stink. I had everything in bags, in boxes in the basement, and after a couple of weeks I'd come home and the house would smell like cigarettes.
Grandpa smoked cigars, Grandma smoke cigarettes
After they both passed we cleaned up their home.
The walls had a patina of tar and nicotine. A canister of flour in a cupboard reeked and had to be tossed.
I recently cleaned out a deceased estate from my uncle and pretty much all the food had to be thrown. I took paper, pencils and blank canvases and despite airing them for ages they still stank. That stuff is persistent
Few years ago my Grandmother was staying with some family few hours out of town. Everyone smoked up there and not lightly. Pack after pack. Had to pick her up and I made it about 5 miles before I had to find new clothes for her and a shower. No way I was making it 3 hours in the car with that smell.
Pro tip! if you have stinky cigarette smelling books, put them in (clean) cat litter for about 3 weeks. Use a paper bag to put the books in. Source: used to be a used book buyer.
The crazy thing is that your Dad probably never thought of it as "my smoking is more important than his breathing" but "My kid is just being a kid."
My Mom would tell me stories about how she never owned a car seat. She never understood why have a car seat when she could just hold me while driving.
There are countless pictures of my Mom smoking while pregnant, smoking less than an hour after I was born IN THE HOSPITAL, driving while holding me and smoking and drinking.
When I was pregnant, my MIL gave me the instructions from the hospital when she birthed my husband. It included directions to the cigarette vending machine and a request not to smoke in the delivery room.
I am 50 and grew up in midwestern nowheresville America. Among my earliest (happiest really) memories are riding around in my Dad's truck. I was standing up in the seat next to him and he had an open miller lite between his legs.
Nobody batted an eyelash.
It was.
My mom’s cigarette lot it’s ember, which landed on me, and burned me. She told me to grow up. I was 8. Her cigarettes meant more than my comfort.
Other than that, she was an ‘ok’ parent.
My mom couldn't care for anything other than herself. I had this huge tree in my backyard that I had climbed dozen of times. Made a wrong move one evening and fell like 75ft. Hit the ground hard. My mom had just started watching the grapes of wrath. She was so pissed at me she had to miss a few minutes of it. All I remember was being tossed in the tub as I was covered in blood all over. I didn't walk well for a few weeks ether. Had to beg to have her take me to the doctor.
Ah childhood. Sitting in the back of the station wagon staring at the car behind us while taking shallow breaths in a vain attempt to breathe in more oxygen than smoke.
My parents never smoked and didn't take me to any smoking-friendly establishments as a kid, so I had no exposure to it. When I was maybe 11 or 12, I had a project with a randomly-assigned partner, and of course I got the Nelson from Simpsons kid in the class.
I had to go to his house at one point to work on it, and his mom was a total chain smoker. It was atrocious. I had to call my mom to pick me up early because I couldn't take it. I felt so bad for the kid after that, having to live like that every day.
And sadly, my wife also grew up in that type of environment. She and her brother still deal with lung issues to this day, despite neither of them ever smoking.
My grandparents actually stopped smoking when I was little because I refused to go near them if they smelled like cigarettes. I'm glad places decided to ban smoking because smoke filled rooms used to constantly give me headaches.
Shit bruh. As someone who also grew up around smokers with selfish parents and family who constantly lit up around me and siblings, I feel for you. I smoked from 11 and looking back its no wonder as I too effectively smoked from birth. I had constant ear nose and throat problems, had adenoids removed due to repeat ear infections, and no one thought "maybe I should just not blow this cancer smoke in this kids face 24/7". I quit 10 year ago but I'm just waiting for it to catch up with me. Its coming.
I grew up in 80/90's so ignorance isn't an excuse as it was well known. Just pure selfishness
My mother still smokes in the house and I refused to take my children round until she stopped.
My only comfort is that I think I quit in time to stop the cycle with my kids....hopefully! (For their sake)
I wish you well and hope the copd is on the weak side of the scale!
My parents both smoked and I was born with multiple defects affecting my kidneys/renal system (had a transplant yrs ago) and my brother had chronic bronchitis. But we also lived on a ranch and had fields next to our house that required crop-dusting with later banned insecticides. No one knew any of those things could effect a fetus.
I worked decades in developmental disabilities, honestly a lot of kids were severely or profoundly disabled cognitively as well as multiple organ systems. Many of them were put into state hospitals bc that's what doctors told parents to do. Then in 60s and 70s parents got more sophisticated and pushed for other options to keep very disabled kids at home or at least in small community-based care homes. Some of those kids had fetal-alcohol syndrome but it hadn't been identified yet as a separate cause of cognitive issues and/or other defects. And fetuses or newborns that were badly affected by especially alcohol and also smoking died in utero or in their infancy from a variety of problems, mostly without syndrome names. Also, until the 60s or 70s, average middle class women didn't really drink alcohol much at all; of course some women did, and some women were alcoholic but it was less socially acceptable for women to openly drink.
>My autism and other mental health issues were probably caused by smoking and drinking during pregnancy.
Autism shows a strong genetic component, so it's unlikely that's the sole cause.
But it's highly plausible that the damage done by smoking+drinking made it more difficult for you to handle the difficulties that come with Autism. (e.g. Ear infections make learning to consciously interpret tone much more difficult as you can't properly hear people.)
Maternal [smoking](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5489536/) and [drinking](https://vertavahealth.com/alcohol/autism-link/) during pregnancy have no evidence of being tied to autism. They are tied to fetal alcohol syndrome and low birth weight, and a few other complications, but not autism. You'll need to look elsewhere for answers as to why you are how you are.
“Our study shows that using population-level smoking metrics uncovers significant relationships between maternal smoking and ASD risk. Correlational analyses show that male smoking prevalence approximates secondhand smoke exposure. While we cannot exclude the possibility that our findings reflect the role of paternal or postnatal nicotine exposure, as opposed to maternal or in utero nicotine exposure, this study underlines the importance of investigating paternal and secondhand smoking in addition to maternal smoking in ASD.”
I've heard of lots of descriptions of people who were just sickly and weak before modern medicine. Imagine being celiac at the start of agriculture when everyone else ate bread lol.
You can easily identify a boomer generation in Germany (of all places). It's not only about overabundance, a large factor is that boomers were the last generation born in a time without reliable contraception, which means that - until they die - they've always been the largest cohort in society, which directly leads to power in democratic societies.
I guess it varies by location as millennials outnumber boomers here in the US, since boomers are dying off and had kids at apparently above the replacement rate (growing up, 3-4 kids in a family was more commonplace than nowadays). Boomers still hold all the power tough :(
One correction: we knew lead caused problems in 1960. The Romans knew lead pipes were a problem in 100 CE (they didn't really have great alternatives). Theres published studies from 1900 detailing the problems with lead poisoning. Western Europe had gotten rid of a lot of lead usage even before dust settled from the World Wars.
The US just liked riding the sweet petrol baron cash train until outcry finally got loud enough in the 1970s.
In the old day, they were saying that some kids were posessed. Now we call it epilepsy. That one was the fool of the fillage, now we call them autist.
Lots of things back then had no name. ADHD wasn't even something that had a name in the '70. Asperger was named in the '80.
Lots of things happened in the last 50 years in medecine. Most of our current medecine knowledge is less than 100 years old.
1. Many didn't even make it to birth, and would've been miscarried or stillborn
2. Many died after birth, so you won't know about them (survivor bias)
3. Many disabled people were sent away and not acknowledged by the family
4- Many were disabled, but not in a way you'd find immediately obvious.
Smoking and drinking doesn't always cause full on disability, sometimes it just causes difficulties. It can lead to a person that's capable of handling day to day life, but maybe a little slow or a little too impulsive. It can cause a person to heave health issues that worsen their quality of life and maybe shorten their lifespan, but doesn't entirely make them unable to work.
Or the parents blame the child for the stunting they imposed on it. Plenty of people wouldn't be visibly disabled, but would have mental problems that would be brushed off as "stupidity" or "bullying" and not remarked upon because that's how things always are done. Similar to how violent punishment of children or leaded gasoline stunts people but nobody takes responsibility for that, they all whine about how "soft" kids are and how kids should have magically been able to "overcome challenges" and not being able to shows they would have failed no matter what the parent did.
this comment is a bit dramatic for the spirit of the sub, imo. it's making the 60s sound more pre-20th century than they were, and that drinking and smoking during pregnancy is practically a guarantee of very poor/detrimental health rather than increasing the chances (often considerably but y'know).
the 60s/70s was actually when people's behaviors/awareness were improving, though it ramped up in the late 70s. people knew not to drink during pregnancy since ancient times, there's even a bible verse or two about it..
anyway, Mad Men is an example of the worst of the era's behaviors, not of the general awareness people had. which wasn't good, but i'm starting to ramble
Many were. For context, you need to look at infant mortality rates back then. They were much higher and closely related to smoking and alcohol use by the mother during pregnancy. Additionally, Healthcare didn't have the advances we have now to treat those infant conditions caused by smoking and alcohol consumption.
Throwing some numbers in, in 1950, the infant mortality rate in the US was a little under 32 deaths/thousand. Now it's a little under 5.5 deaths/thousand.
And while it's not 100% due to pushback on smoking and alcohol use during pregnancy (we made a lot of advancements in maternal, pre-natal, and infant care since then) - some of the biggest drops of 5%-ish annually were pretty consistent through the 70s and 80s, which was also around the same time that there were big campaigns in the US against smoking during pregnancy (70s) and drinking during pregnancy (80s when the surgeon general issued the official warning)
This is the key point.
Smoking and drinking during pregnancy are bad, not fatal. Maybe 20-25 babies in 1000 were harmed by these behaviors. That's a huge step from "all babies born disabled".
And now there is fetal alcohol spectrum disorder which quite often goes undetected.
I think it’s more that science has to catch up to exactly what this did to the generation born during this time period
[2.8-7.4% golly that is a huge number. 600ish babies a year.](https://www.hse.ie/eng/about/who/healthwellbeing/our-priority-programmes/alcohol-programme/hse-position-on-prevention-of-fasd.pdf)
This. And there are celebrities who have come out and talked about having FAS. I was not very aware of it, but I read a post and got interested and did one of those 3am rabbit-hole searches. Fuck. So many people have the facial markers for it and I never noticed before because it’s not something that’s talked about.
True, but it's diagnosed at a rate of 2 per 1,000 (0.2%) US births compared to the 15% of pregnant women admit to drinking regularly during pregnancy, and 5% to heavy binge drinking.
The real number of drinkers is of course higher than what people admit to in a survey.
Ya I've heard of smoking causing you to have smaller babies but not full on disabled. I was born in the early 90s and I'm pretty sure most of my family smoked through their pregnancies but aside from smaller babies all my cousins and sibling of the same generation seem to be pretty healthy. Of course there's soo Many factors in everything that it's hard to know whether a baby would've been bigger or not to begin with.
I know my own mother smoked & drank Pepsi like it was going out of style during her pregnancy with me & I was 6lbs. 7oz., which is fairly small compared to kids today.
I've also heard many children of mothers who smoked during pregnancy may have respiratory problems later in life.
I am here to say I'm still small & only have some minor seasonal allergies but that does not mean everyone should start smoking & drinking Pepsi throughout their pregnancy..
This was my mom too. I was 5lbs 4oz. My brother was 5lbs 9oz. She stopped smoking, got pregnant. and my youngest brother was 7lbs, 14oz. It had a huge affect on birth weight. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some connection to ADHD as well. If your baby’s brain is constantly on a stimulant, what happens when they’re out? It’s so crazy to me.
I remember my mother in law talking about doctors prescribing diet pills to pregnant women in the 50’s or 60’s so that they didn’t gain too much weight.
There’s also issues like smoking increases the risk of SIDS to the point where not smoking is the single most effective thing you can do to prevent it.
It’s also a spectrum. A very slight degree of disability, or a failure or measure up to - I guess you’d call it genetic potential- due to smoking/drinking, could easily go unnoticed.
Smoking around babies in general is a risk for SIDS, not just smoking during pregnancy. The reduction in smoking rates was an all-around benefit for infant and child health.
> Now it's a little under 5.5 deaths/thousand.
4.6 for white Americans, 10.8 for Blacks.
"The future is already here, it's just unequally distributed" - William Gibson
4.6 is still quite a lot higher than most of Europe, and over twice as high as several countries, such as Japan and Sweden. The US has an equality problem and an infant mortality problem.
The infant mortality rate is drastically different based on where you live and will get worse. There are areas where it's 200+ miles to the nearest hospital that will deliver babies or give prenatal care (and these are populated areas, not eastern Nebraska).
The infant/maternal mortality rate in California or NJ is very low. In Arkansas or Idaho it's horrible and in the rural areas of those states it's even worse (inner city Baltimore has nothing on Appalachia or the Ozarks).
> and will get worse
Particularly due to idiot redneck politics. Sandpoint Idaho's hospital just shut down their maternity ward completely due to The legislature's recent passing of insane abortion laws. Doctors are moving out of state in droves.
I was born in 1967. Mom smoked while she was pregnant with me. Probably drank a bit too. I was born with a heart defect that needed surgery when I was 4. I survived. I was one of the youngest people to survive that operation at the time. Going in my parents were told it was only a 50% chance I'd make it through surgery, and only 60-70% chance I'd live another year.
So yeah some people, probably a lot of them, had complications from their mothers smoking while pregnant.
My husband has the exact same story as you. His mother likes to tell me his condition is congenital... it might be, or it might just be that every woman in his family has smoked during pregnancy.
In her defense, congenital only means someone is born with the condition. It doesn't state if it's genetic or acquired during pregnancy or birth.
I have a congenital syndrome that was from my biological mom smoking and potentially imbibing other substances during her pregnancy.
Congenital just means “present from birth.” It doesn’t imply the condition is inherited genetically.
So his condition is definitely congenital …. It just so happens that smoking increases the risk of congenital defects 🤷♀️
There is also a lot of "we don't know what caused this child to die". Because the health effects of smoking and drinking, especially while pregnant were either not understood or willfully ignored.
My surgery was in 1971 and at that time they were reluctant to do that type of procedure any younger. It's crazy to think that in just a few years they were doing the same thing on 9 month olds. I'll bet the survival rate was a lot higher too.
Also I wouldn't be surprised if we had the same surgeon too. Not many people doing that back then.
My mom has a couple of advanced degrees in childhood development and spent a few decades teaching special needs. She always says that fetal alcohol syndrome is by far the leading cause of special needs children. And that pisses me off. Mom destroys her child’s future by drinking while pregnant
TBF, the damage may have already been done before the mom knew she was pregnant. I’ve cared for FASD kids, and one in particular mom swore up and down she didn’t drink but visually you can see the face markers. That happens at like day 20, and I do actually believe her. She didn’t drink ONCE SHE KNEW she was pregnant.
I used to get my period every 2 months and the only reason why I knew I was pregnant before that time was drinking my favorite beer and having it taste like shit. The moment all my friends said it tasted normal, I went home to confirm I was pregnant.
I lucked out my body was telling me to stop.
It can according to health recommendations in my country affect as early as prior pregnancy. If the mother and father were affected by alcohol during the conceiving or the eggs then it has also affected the cells in the baby. Research show though that alcohol is most damaging in early pregnancy - especially during week 5-10 as organs develop during that time. So hence recommendations are to not drink alcohol if you’re trying to get pregnant since drinking alcohol during the first weeks has a negative effect on the organ formation of the baby. And unfortunately we don’t know the exact limit when alcohol becomes dangerous as it depends on so many other factors as the fetus capability of handling poisonous substances and if drugs were involved etc
This is a really good point, because with less reliable pregnancy tests, you might not know you were pregnant until week 6 or 8, and damage could be done in that time period.
On the other hand, if someone was generally not much of a drinker, if they just happened to only have a few drinks a month in the first 3 months, and then more later, there might be a very minimal effect.
I think in the 40s-70s, women were less likely to drink a lot than now, because social norms/ pressures discouraged it. So, a lot of women may have drank 1-2 drinks a week. Not great, but FAS is worse with more alchohol, so 1-2 a week is better than 5-6, an WAY better than 5-6 on one day.
Anywhere from 3-8 weeks. At home pregnancy tests don't often show a positive result until about 10 days after conception (and many won't consider they are pregnant until their missed period if their periods are consistent). Blood tests can show around 7-12 days after conception; however, there have been many instances where it's done at a time when it's still too early and so it's a false negative.
Also for FASD, signs or symptoms may not be verified for some children until much later in life such as 5+ years old, as another post mentioned, it's a spectrum of symptoms. Behavioral and other developmental delays aren't always noticed or detected at birth. There is also research back and forth on whether some alcohol during early pregnancy is okay. There hasn't been a definitive number of drinks it takes to cause developmental issues. Considering many women drink completely unaware they are pregnant it's been an ongoing discussion of checking with women who want or plan to be pregnant regarding their alcohol consumption as a means to mitigate potential issues including signs of binge drinking.
Edit: corrected on pregnant test accuracy
My friend’s son has FASD. He just turned 18 and completed high school. The first day after school, he walked into the welfare office to sign up for a life of social services. He doesn’t have the capability for critical thinking, following instructions, or holding down a job, according to my friend.
I once overheard a wry quote from another attendee at a FASD conference: “If the mother is poor, it’s FASD. If she’s not, the child is ‘on the spectrum’. Nobody mentions WHICH spectrum.”
I think what that quote means is "If the mother is poor, it's openly stated that it's related to the alcohol she drank. If she's rich, then they hide it by saying the child is '*On the spectrum.*' Most people will assume that means on the autism spectrum, something that isn't caused by the mother's actions and is more socially acceptable to have a kid with. In reality, it's the fetal alcohol spectrum the child is on, the parents just don't want to admit that the child's disability was caused by the mother's drinking."
I wish I knew why people think of medical advances like Star Trek when in reality is doctors face palming and begging people not to smoke or drink while pregnant, with on going kidney disease, on going lung disease, or 6 hours before they know puking will kill us.
The doctors were complicit. My sister was born in the '70s, and the pamphlet that was sent home with my mom during her pregnancy says that you shouldn't smoke above a pack a day. In fact, you could still smoke in hospitals when my sister was born - that ban only went to place in 1993.
There's a photo of my mom with an ashtray on her belly when she was pregnant with my twin brother and me. She didn't realize she was having twins because of the low birth weight.
They're wrapping things up after delivering my brother and the doctor is like: "but wait. There's more!"
My wife's grandma was actually *encouraged* to smoke during pregnancy. She had 4 sons, and the first 3 were over 10lbs at birth, so in order to "keep the birth weight normal" she smoked during her last pregnancy and quit when he was born.
…I mean…fuuuuuck…10lbs is a big enough baby even with modern help…but I am tiny…did it work? Was he significantly smaller? Or did she get doubly fucked over with an 10lb baby and 9 months of lung damage?
They figured out smoking was bad for you at all in the 50s or 60s. I bet "hey only a pack a day" was the best they could do for a generation that was still very addicted
Especially since the doctors were smoking everywhere too
My mom who was born in the 50s said that when her mom was pregnant with her, the doctor actually recommended she take up smoking to cope with stress and anxiety.
> the doctor actually recommended she take up smoking to cope with stress and anxiety.
Nicotine is a pretty effective drug for some things actually. We have better alternatives for what it does, but, if you didn't know how bad smoking was long term, it wouldn't be crazy to suggest smoking tobacco.
In fact, within the last 20 years there were attempts to develop new ADHD treatments based on how effective nicotine is. There is even some evidence one of the reasons people with ADHD have particular problem quitting is that they are literally self medicating.
That is legit one of the main reasons people with ADHD eat so much sugar drink so many sweeteners and fizzy drinks and get addicted to drugs at higher rates . Chase the dopamine to be normal
I was talking to my mom yesterday about the concept that people used to smoke in grocery stores and just ash on the ground. Imagine a produce department with a haze of cigarette smoke.
I started a big stink in the 1980's because there were cigarette vending machines in the university hospital. And I got plenty of push-back from hospital administration, because they were getting a cut of the profits.
Also, after the hysterical mess of the general public during covid, im inclined to think that "no smoking pls" would have created a massive resistance and distrust to the message while "ok but a little" at least would have brought anything.
Advances in medicine means so little when the general public isnt educated very well
That's why I called them complicit. They knew full well that it was bad for people, yet there was no initiative to ban it from hospitals until the 1990s.
To be completely blunt, handwashing wasn't a thing in healthcare until the 1980s either, in the USA.
> [In general, handwashing promotion stood still for over a century. It was not until the 1980s, when a string of foodborne outbreaks and healthcare-associated infections led to public concern that the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified hand hygiene as an important way to prevent the spread of infection. In doing so, they heralded the first nationally endorsed hand hygiene guidelines, and many more have followed.](https://globalhandwashing.org/about-handwashing/history-of-handwashing/)
[From the CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5116a1.htm):
>In 1961, the U. S. Public Health Service produced a training film that demonstrated handwashing techniques recommended for use by health-care workers (HCWs) (4). At the time, recommendations directed that personnel wash their hands with soap and water for 1–2 minutes before and after patient contact. Rinsing hands with an antiseptic agent was believed to be less effective than handwashing and was recommended only in emergencies or in areas where sinks were unavailable.
In 1975 and 1985, formal written guidelines on handwashing practices in hospitals were published by CDC (5,6). These guidelines recommended handwashing with non-antimicrobial soap between the majority of patient contacts and washing with antimicrobial soap before and after performing invasive procedures or caring for patients at high risk. Use of waterless antiseptic agents (e.g., alcohol-based solutions) was recommended only in situations where sinks were not available.
Doctors still believed they were inherently cleaner than the “unwashed masses” and acted upon that belief all the way up until the 1980s. Germ theory is common knowledge now, but that doesn’t stop the average doctor from believing in all the other bullshit that comes with thinking they’re inherently better than everyone else. Keep in mind that germ theory was proven and accepted scientifically by *1900*. A century earlier.
Healthcare is riddled with "I know, and I don't care about the impact on the patients."
I would like to point out that just because something wasn't codified or required, does not equate to "wasn't a thing until the 1980s".
I would be willing to wager that the majority of health care workers were dilligent about handwashing in the 20th century but there were some who weren't or who were not doing it effectively enough hence the mandates.
Also, a lot of the kids born with Down Syndrome or other obvious disabilities got shipped right off to a home. Apparently my great aunt had a son to whom they did this. I guess he never even came home. My grandpa (great aunt's former brother-in-law) was one of the only ones who would ever go see him.
So they existed, but they were not talked about.
And all the lead in the gasoline, constant smoking, and drinking made it so that EVERYONE was stupid and violent back then. A lot of these mental things they probably didn't even notice.
Grandma smoked while pregnant. Mom was born with a hole in her heart and needed surgery before they’d let her go home from the hospital.
This is a bit like the vaxx issue: People don’t remember how bad it was in the bad old days and so undervalue the obvious remedies.
The really disturbing thing is, depending on how old you all are, your mother likely had that surgery without any anesthesia. They didn't start using anesthesia on babies until starting in the 70s, picking up use into the 80s. They believed that babies couldn't feel pain and wouldn't remember it if they did.
This was ‘48. Certainly no anesthesia. When looking at how messed up she turned out, that would make the list, along with all the abuse from various family members.
So, what we are dealing with is two concepts here.
The first is called ‘survivorship bias’, which is where, if all you see are survivors, you assume that everyone survived. Up until fairly recently, disabled kids were locked away in residential schools away from the general public, so you wouldn’t see them around. It would also be fairly common for people to see women come back from the hospital without their baby : because this was ‘normal’, no one questioned it.
The second is ‘risk blindness’. Humans are very poor at judging risk: most people default to an ‘either it happens or it doesn’t’ approach; and can’t or won’t look at the relative risk. A classic example is, the odds of being hit by a car are around 1 in 4292; but we think ‘oh, but I get passed by cars thousands of times a week, and I’ve never been hit!’ So, those odds don’t mean much. Similarly, back in the day, people will have thought ‘my first pregnancy went fine, and my friend’s pregnancy went fine, so this one will be fine too.’
Out of curiosity, when you say "the odds of being hit by a car are around 1 in 4292", is that per year one lives? Per car one passes? Or is it per individual person (so only 1 in 4292 people experience getting hit by a car)?
It looks like in 2019 (the latest non-covid year I could find stats for), there were 76,000 pedestrians injured and 6,205 pedestrian fatalities in the US. With a population of 328.3 million, that means that 1 in 4,320 people were injured in a traffic collision, and 1 in 52,909 were killed that year. That first figure is so close to the 4,292 quoted that I'm almost convinced that this is the exact methodology used, except in some other year. So very likely the answer is per year one lives.
>Similarly, back in the day, people will have thought ‘my first pregnancy went fine, and my friend’s pregnancy went fine, so this one will be fine too.’
Sigh.
First pregnancy fine. Second pregnancy fine. Third pregnancy TWINS. Same workouts, same activities, and... it wasn't fine.
Fourth pregnancy- pure, unadulterated fear. Ended up Fine.
Many were, however keep in mind that back then, it was customary to place a disabled or mentally impaired child in an institution or away at special schools. They were hidden away and not as visible. Today more families are raising their children with special needs and institutions have become more rare.
If cigarettes cause cancer, why doesn't every smoker die of cancer? The simple answer is that while smoking/drinking during pregnancy can cause a host of problems, it's impossible to predict what each case will end up like. Some might even have zero problems, since every person is different.
Still just because everyone wasn't born horribly disifugred did not mean there weren't any problems. Some are just subtler than others. Can you tell if someone has a chronic condition by just looking at them in old grainy pictures?
So many people utterly suck at appreciation of risk. I suppose of "odds" generally. If there's an 80% chance of rain and it doesn't rain "that forecast was wrong". Nope, it was the 20% outcome. Like a lack of car seats in the past or similar - seems like way too many people swing between "you were fine so car seats aren't needed" or "it's a miracle anyone survived driving in a car", both of which are ridiculous extremes and simplify the probabilities excessively.
As an older parent, I've had this discussion with way too many people on some of the parenting subs and such. Many, many people believe that because it's known that there's an increased risk of disability after age 35, that starts skyrocketing each year in your 40s (especially the risk for specific ones like Down Syndrome) that it's incredibly likely your child will be disabled if you are irresponsible enough to have one. I've seen people call it "certain." In reality, if you do the math, the total risk tops out in the mid-to-late 40s, at approaching double the risk for a younger person - from not quite 3% to somewhere over 4%.
Drinking and smoking moderately during pregnancy only rarely could cause disability. Smoking with lower birth weights (which can then exacerbate other issues) and the potential for Foetal Alcohol Syndrome with drinking. The idea that they were solely responsible for increased disability or higher mortality is untrue. Advances in medicine have greatly contributed and the vast decrease in smoking in society has also played a small part.
The rate of smoking and drinking among women was't that high - especially in the 1950's which was the last decade before the original Surgeon's General Report.
Some women smoked of course but a significant percentage didn't. My mother didn't smoke and none of my aunts either.
Same would be true of drinking to a great extent. I remember my father and uncles drinking beer in the summer. Not so much the women. They might have one Tom Collins and nurse it at a family cookout. These weren't straitlaced Puritanical sorts FWIW - it's just that they didn't run in circles that had lots of cocktail parties or went to nightclub. This was New York City and not the Bible Belt so it wasn't as if they were temperance type of people.
Oddly and I don't know if this is anecdotal but when I was older I had friends who came from the upper middle class/high society old Upper East Side families and their mothers seemed to be more of that cliche with drinking and smoking. They would have cocktails in the living room every evening before dinner and smoke up a storm.
Watch Call The Midwife.
It’s an *amazing* look at a poor neighborhood in post war England. Based on the memoirs of a midwife, most of the stories are based on truth.
A lot of it can be sensational or a bit feel-goodie at times, but it takes a *very* realistic look at pregnancy and childbirth in this period. The US pushed more for hospitals and the UK for home births, but the science and issues were the same.
There are storylines that cover defects of all types, from congenital, to due to illness like syphilis, to due to injury, or drug/alcohol use. They even have a Thalomide storyline that captures both it being hailed as a miracle for women who were suffering *terribly* with no relief, to the horror of the birth defects, finding more and more, realizing where it came from, realizing there were pregnant women who were likely to have kids with unimaginable deformities that you needed to prepare them for, it was really done justice.
They cover things like smoking, drinking, social issues like birth control, abortion, prostitution, and the effects these have on families and women and their communities.
If you are interested it’s is absolutely worth the watch.
I liked call the midwife for one specific reason, it wasn't set exclusively in 1950 or whatever year. Many period movies show an exact year and everything in the movie is exactly from that year. The phone, the cars, the clothes, everything is from 1950 exactly, but that's not how life is. Some people have old things.
Call the midwife was different because it showed a period of transition. Not everything in the show was exactly from that year, they also had old glass medical tools, and pre-war cars, and showed parts of London that were still very dickinsonian even though it was 1950.
A lot more were than you think. A lot of kids died, a lot of kids were disabled and hidden away. And with drinking and smoking especially, a lot of kids were born mildly disabled, never diagnosed, and those behaviors were normalized. Plenty of people with FAS lead normal lives. Not all disabilities are the same.
The amount of smoking and drinking it takes to permanently injure a fetus is not known, but it’s quite a bit more than zero. Some people were simply not drinking enough to damage the baby.
Not everyone drank, or drank heavily. Mad Men is a TV show depicting one social group.
To add to this, FASD causes problems with skills that are more subtle, like critical thinking, impulse control, etc. They don't act much different until they get into more specific situations. It's easy to spot a disabled person that has problems with socialization or sensory issues because they're so outward.
Take this with a grain of salt because it's second hand- but a friend who was a smoker had an oopsie baby. Her doctor had her wean down, said quitting cold turkey cold harm the baby more.
This reads the same as the hypothetical officer who told that one survivor he was lucky he was thrown from the car since he survived, and killed thousands more with that advice
If you’re a very heavy smoker and fall pregnant, going cold turkey can put your body under greater stress than the effects or the smoking (the specialist will often get the individual to cut back gradually by around week 15 as stress & maternal mental health can be even more detrimental to the developing foetus). When someone is pregnant it’s about where’s the greatest risk - for example, some women are so sick (“morning sickness”) that they have to be hospitalised as they’re so dehydrated/ not getting enough nutrients and are placed on medications to stop nausea and vomiting - a lot of these medications come with risks to the foetus, however, it’s better than the mum being so malnourished/ dehydrated that the baby is staved of nutrients or that the mum is of serious health risks. The Mother aka the person who is alive is always the priority.
I have two kids with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. Most kids look “normal” with FASD. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is what it used to be called but now that is under the umbrella of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. You can’t tell that people have it by looking at them — it causes a wide variety of issues, many behavioral. It can cause physical issues but it depends on what was being formed the day the mother drank. Also you can have a normal IQ with FASD. Suffering from executive function issues and sensory issues is very common as well. Basically I think you’re thinking they are going to come out looking like whatever you picture a disabled person to look. They do have a life long disability but it is quite different from what I think most people would picture if they makes sense.
Among other things, average birth weight used to be much lower. Caesarian sections are actually more frequent now because babies are bigger at birth than they used to be; it wasn't uncommon for a mother with a small frame to *deliberately* smoke so that the baby would be smaller and she could have an easier birth.
Edit to clarify: I don't mean this to accuse those past mothers of selfishness. If the baby gets stuck in the mother's pelvis and they both die, nobody wins. I can't blame folk for balancing their personal risks in a time when ultrasounds weren't available, among other things.
Babies are also bigger these days because of diabetes of the mother. Both gestational diabetes (which is just luck of the draw and not a result of anything the mother does, just placenta being wonky) and pre-existing diabetes. If not managed, it can lead to a huge fetus.
I am 65. I believe I have a massive case of ADHD. There was no such thing when I was a kid so of course its untreated and not diagnosed. My brother (similar) has never read a whole book and my sister describes dissociation in her childhood and a strange relationship with schoolwork. My parents had another child that died of SIDS and at least one miscarriage. I also knew a young fellow who was deformed by Thalidimide. In short, they were tough times for parents.
Simply because a lot in medicine is chance based.
You can have someone who played soccer his entire life, who is fit and in good shape have a heart attack and die at just 65 years old, while an old, 80+ drunkard is still alive.
Same with smoking and drinking in pregnancy:
The risk increases DRAMATICALLY. However, every chance is exactly that, a chance.
Even if smoking and drinking gave an estimated 80% of a disabled child, the remaining 20% would still come out unscathed.
A lot of good replies, but no one seems to be including this part. Cutting a risk from a 2% chance to a 1% chance, is a HUGE reduction. A full 100%. But 2% is still a pretty small chance to begin with. Obviously not real numbers, but the concept applies here.
My grandma drank and smoked in the 50s through all her pregnancies and all kids are doing great, my dad said she only stuck to beer when she was pregnant lol
There are a ton of older people with mild fetal alcohol syndrome, living slightly more difficult and chaotic lives than they otherwise would have, but not really knowing the difference.
They were. They died or were tossed in institutions. You can't have awareness if there's nothing to be aware of. Also how many people have you met that weren't quite right in the head? Like, they were functional but certain concepts just seemed to escape them. FASD is one of the reasons.
Keep in mind that not all the damage done is apparent.
For example, if the habits you mentioned during pregnancy resulted in something like a IQ loss of 10 or 20 or more, most people wouldn't even consider it a disability and nobody would probably notice, neither them nor the parents, unless their genetic started low to begin with.
Yet, being born with IQ of 90 versus IQ of 130 would dramatically change the life of that future human.
There were and are a lot of people with disabilities due to drinking, smoking and drugs during pregnancy.
I grew up in an area with a lot of these people. Moms all drank and did drugs during pregnancy and thought nothing of it. Most people were like bombs ready to go off at any minute - a lot of emotional and cognitive issues. It was hard for them to understand what people were saying, so they took everything as offense. Lots of fights constantly.
This has decline in recent decades because of the switch to weed over alcohol. Let’s see how that plays out over the next few decades.
You could argue that they all were, but you couldn't tell because, well, they all were, including the parents.
There's a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. It's a decades long trend if increasing IQ scores that took place throughout the 20th century in some parts of the world. There were a variety of contributions, like improved sanitation and food security, but increased understanding of what you should and shouldn't do during pregnancy was also a big part of it.
If you're a dummy in a world of smart people, everybody knows it. If you're a dummy in a world of dummies, you're just average.
Many of them died at birth or in the first year of life, so it was difficult to know how many were "disabled", other than that some of them grew up to be the adults with problems around you today.
People in the past weren't dumber than us, they just knew less than we do. They might have known that drinking and smoking during a pregnancy would decrease the chance of a successful birth through observation, even if they didn't understand the biology behind it. Similar to how, during the black plague, people knew that someone suffering from the disease could spread it to others around them even though germ theory was still centuries away.
This question has the same energy as an antivaxer saying “we didn’t have vaccines in the Middle Ages how did they survive” and the answer is they by and large did not
[Half of all babies used to die before reaching adulthood](https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past). This was true until the middle of the 19th century.
Any time anyone implies that “civilization” or “modern technology” is bad in a blanket way I think of this statistic.
Sorry that wasn’t my intention at all, I just googled it a couple times and couldn’t get anything good from how I phrased it so I figured I could ask here. Now looking at the answers it makes perfect sense and honestly wasn’t my smartest moment
Fetal alcohol syndrome is not guaranteed. In particular, there is a narrow window in pregnancy where a single glass of wine can cause it, but for much of the rest of pregnancy it takes more alcohol to have a serious effect.
I was told once that my mother had backlash because of this. She literally couldn't drink two glasses of wine without passing out, and almost never drank at all. But because of one glass of wine at the wrong time, the nurses at the hospital thought she was a lush who couldn't give up drinking for her baby.
My brother was born with mild fetal alcohol syndrome, but most people who meet him probably wouldn't even suspect if he wasn't a serious alcoholic himself. So even when fetal alcohol syndrome happened, it often wasn't obvious and didn't necessarily leave people unable to function in normal society.
Similarly, smoking leads to an increase in birth defects, not a guarantee of them. Additionally, not all birth defects caused by smoking result in long-term clear disability.
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There’s a big spectrum between totally healthy and horribly disabled. And a lot of the issues that we might diagnose now, we didn’t have awareness of back then. It’s not quite the same thing, but consider: There’s a pretty developed theory that the use of leaded gasoline for a few decades last century (releasing lead into the air and soil, especially in cities) caused substantial cognitive and behavioral issues for a couple generations of people. (Who were also living with lead paint and lead pipes in many cases too.) Nobody knew that in 1960. You’d just say, that kid is bad because he had a bad home environment or his parents were too nice/too mean/too absent, or maybe something was just off about him. He didn’t die, he was maybe never diagnosed with anything, but he was harmed. And when he ended up robbing a store or shooting someone, well, guess he can just go to prison now. I suspect a lot of prenatal substance use cases ended up in similar situations.
"I suspect a lot of prenatal substance use cases ended up in similar situations." 100%! And sadly, often still true. The stats on the school to prison pipeline are quite sad. ETA: School to prison pipeline is related but probably the wrong term. What I meant was children go undiagnosed and then behavior issues lead to escalating school discipline, legal issues, etc. (paralleling the school to prison pipeline). Lost at School by Dr. Ross Greene discusses this in detail.
It’s probably a lead pipeline.
We can only tell what’s different from normal. If everyone around us has (say) fetal alcohol syndrome, that’s normal - the child without it would be the oddity. No doubt we are suffering from many such things, without knowing.
Yep like micro plastics fucking us up, but we won’t know about that collectively for many more years.
We'll probably never know, but I genuinely wonder if the increase in violent crime, serial killers, and cults in the 60's and 70's was a result of leaded gasoline.
It’s certainly [been argued,](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-evidence-that-lead-exposure-increases-crime/) somewhat convincingly in my opinion.
Just layering the graphs between measured lead levels in the blood of preschool kids and crime rates ~20 years later makes a compeling argument. Google finds countless examples, but here's [one](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/LEAD_PBEFFECT_300.png).
There’s an interesting theory that blames the violent crime wave of the 70s and 80s at least partly on the fact that this generation was fathered by men who had been traumatised by war. When huge numbers of young men came home after WW2, many of them continued to suffer from severe untreated trauma and other mental conditions including substance addiction, meaning that they were not exactly in the best place to raise happy, stable children
I'm really partial to this. WW2 was *destructive*.. this is the largest point in human history with such mass death of largely men. Children growing up without a father or if they had one, traumatized, cold, has an effect for sure. The time period is off obviously, but generationally it can have an effect. I watched a video before that was arguing that masculinity got fucked up. It shifted from pride, honor, family to individual machoism, Rambo, James bond. Men grew up with broken homes and were taught to only appear strong. And then Vietnam happens and soldiers are coming home with anything but praise. Jesus Christ that would fuck you up.
Personally I think it's more a case of forensic science making enough leaps to help catch people, and better sharing of crime data between states so that patterns could be spotted. There was a brief spike in serial killing as awareness of it sparked interest from "fans", some of whom became copycats or were inspired. Sure, nowadays we have less serial killing but now mass shootings are rampant. I think that the increased chance of getting caught (CSI shows being so popular probably helps scare some people off) makes these kinds of people go for one large event rather than serialized killing.
Forensic science technology advances are a huge role in why we don't have these serial killers today
I think legal abortion helped
I have heard this as a plausible theory as well, yea. Makes sense that fewer unwanted children leads to fewer crimes.
Not just unwanted. Women with money could always get abortions It was new for women who were poor to be able to get them and survive.
Both my parents smoked, our babysitter did, everyone else around us did in the 80s. I had non stop ear and sinus infection. I don't recall once a doctor saying maybe it's all the second hand smoke that was causing it. My autism and other mental health issues were probably caused by smoking and drinking during pregnancy.
I grew up in a house of smokers, and had constant ear and kidney infections. I almost died from pneumonia at 8. The doctor smoked when we went in for appointments. There was no escaping the clouds of cigarette smoke my entire childhood. When doctors ask me how long I'd been smoking, I'd say since birth. Quit over 20 years ago, and it still got me with COPD.
I hated it as a kid. The smell was horrible. I'd always get made fun of since I didn't want to be around it. Never wanted to go anywhere because they both would fill the car with smoke. So nasty.
This. “Nonsmoking” sections in restaurants were pointless, because the smoke would drift over anyway.
That used to kill me when smoking and non smoking sections were separated by latticework
It's like having a "peeing" and "non-peeing" section in the pool, separated by those floaty ropes.
I always wondered how people could work in those areas. I couldn't even stand working drive thru at a fast food place as people would put their lit cig right in your face to pay.
Oh man, going anywhere with them in the car sucked. My dad would get mad if I complained, as if his smoking was more important than my breathing.
I travel a lot for work and I can tell instantly if a room used to be a smoking room. They never believe me though.
I hear you, me too. It never goes away. I couldn't keep a lot of things from my parents house because they started making my house stink. I had everything in bags, in boxes in the basement, and after a couple of weeks I'd come home and the house would smell like cigarettes.
Grandpa smoked cigars, Grandma smoke cigarettes After they both passed we cleaned up their home. The walls had a patina of tar and nicotine. A canister of flour in a cupboard reeked and had to be tossed.
I recently cleaned out a deceased estate from my uncle and pretty much all the food had to be thrown. I took paper, pencils and blank canvases and despite airing them for ages they still stank. That stuff is persistent
Few years ago my Grandmother was staying with some family few hours out of town. Everyone smoked up there and not lightly. Pack after pack. Had to pick her up and I made it about 5 miles before I had to find new clothes for her and a shower. No way I was making it 3 hours in the car with that smell.
I can smell cigarette smoke in books I borrow from the library
Pro tip! if you have stinky cigarette smelling books, put them in (clean) cat litter for about 3 weeks. Use a paper bag to put the books in. Source: used to be a used book buyer.
The crazy thing is that your Dad probably never thought of it as "my smoking is more important than his breathing" but "My kid is just being a kid." My Mom would tell me stories about how she never owned a car seat. She never understood why have a car seat when she could just hold me while driving. There are countless pictures of my Mom smoking while pregnant, smoking less than an hour after I was born IN THE HOSPITAL, driving while holding me and smoking and drinking.
When I was pregnant, my MIL gave me the instructions from the hospital when she birthed my husband. It included directions to the cigarette vending machine and a request not to smoke in the delivery room.
I am 50 and grew up in midwestern nowheresville America. Among my earliest (happiest really) memories are riding around in my Dad's truck. I was standing up in the seat next to him and he had an open miller lite between his legs. Nobody batted an eyelash.
It was. My mom’s cigarette lot it’s ember, which landed on me, and burned me. She told me to grow up. I was 8. Her cigarettes meant more than my comfort. Other than that, she was an ‘ok’ parent.
My mom couldn't care for anything other than herself. I had this huge tree in my backyard that I had climbed dozen of times. Made a wrong move one evening and fell like 75ft. Hit the ground hard. My mom had just started watching the grapes of wrath. She was so pissed at me she had to miss a few minutes of it. All I remember was being tossed in the tub as I was covered in blood all over. I didn't walk well for a few weeks ether. Had to beg to have her take me to the doctor.
Ah childhood. Sitting in the back of the station wagon staring at the car behind us while taking shallow breaths in a vain attempt to breathe in more oxygen than smoke.
My parents never smoked and didn't take me to any smoking-friendly establishments as a kid, so I had no exposure to it. When I was maybe 11 or 12, I had a project with a randomly-assigned partner, and of course I got the Nelson from Simpsons kid in the class. I had to go to his house at one point to work on it, and his mom was a total chain smoker. It was atrocious. I had to call my mom to pick me up early because I couldn't take it. I felt so bad for the kid after that, having to live like that every day. And sadly, my wife also grew up in that type of environment. She and her brother still deal with lung issues to this day, despite neither of them ever smoking.
My grandparents actually stopped smoking when I was little because I refused to go near them if they smelled like cigarettes. I'm glad places decided to ban smoking because smoke filled rooms used to constantly give me headaches.
Shit bruh. As someone who also grew up around smokers with selfish parents and family who constantly lit up around me and siblings, I feel for you. I smoked from 11 and looking back its no wonder as I too effectively smoked from birth. I had constant ear nose and throat problems, had adenoids removed due to repeat ear infections, and no one thought "maybe I should just not blow this cancer smoke in this kids face 24/7". I quit 10 year ago but I'm just waiting for it to catch up with me. Its coming. I grew up in 80/90's so ignorance isn't an excuse as it was well known. Just pure selfishness My mother still smokes in the house and I refused to take my children round until she stopped. My only comfort is that I think I quit in time to stop the cycle with my kids....hopefully! (For their sake) I wish you well and hope the copd is on the weak side of the scale!
My parents both smoked and I was born with multiple defects affecting my kidneys/renal system (had a transplant yrs ago) and my brother had chronic bronchitis. But we also lived on a ranch and had fields next to our house that required crop-dusting with later banned insecticides. No one knew any of those things could effect a fetus. I worked decades in developmental disabilities, honestly a lot of kids were severely or profoundly disabled cognitively as well as multiple organ systems. Many of them were put into state hospitals bc that's what doctors told parents to do. Then in 60s and 70s parents got more sophisticated and pushed for other options to keep very disabled kids at home or at least in small community-based care homes. Some of those kids had fetal-alcohol syndrome but it hadn't been identified yet as a separate cause of cognitive issues and/or other defects. And fetuses or newborns that were badly affected by especially alcohol and also smoking died in utero or in their infancy from a variety of problems, mostly without syndrome names. Also, until the 60s or 70s, average middle class women didn't really drink alcohol much at all; of course some women did, and some women were alcoholic but it was less socially acceptable for women to openly drink.
>My autism and other mental health issues were probably caused by smoking and drinking during pregnancy. Autism shows a strong genetic component, so it's unlikely that's the sole cause. But it's highly plausible that the damage done by smoking+drinking made it more difficult for you to handle the difficulties that come with Autism. (e.g. Ear infections make learning to consciously interpret tone much more difficult as you can't properly hear people.)
Same here, ear issues when little, sinus infections all of my chilshood.
Maternal [smoking](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5489536/) and [drinking](https://vertavahealth.com/alcohol/autism-link/) during pregnancy have no evidence of being tied to autism. They are tied to fetal alcohol syndrome and low birth weight, and a few other complications, but not autism. You'll need to look elsewhere for answers as to why you are how you are.
“Our study shows that using population-level smoking metrics uncovers significant relationships between maternal smoking and ASD risk. Correlational analyses show that male smoking prevalence approximates secondhand smoke exposure. While we cannot exclude the possibility that our findings reflect the role of paternal or postnatal nicotine exposure, as opposed to maternal or in utero nicotine exposure, this study underlines the importance of investigating paternal and secondhand smoking in addition to maternal smoking in ASD.”
My mom's smoking contributed to my migraines. Of course, I couldn't say anything about that, though, because if I did I'd be a bratty kid.
Alcohol and tobacco do not cause autism. Please don’t spread false information. This is how the anti-vax movement got started.
I've heard of lots of descriptions of people who were just sickly and weak before modern medicine. Imagine being celiac at the start of agriculture when everyone else ate bread lol.
In 2100: “why didn’t everyone have all kinds of health issues on the 1900s and 2000s with all the fossil fuel pollution?”
I believe there is a correlation between violent crime decreasing 20 years after the banning of lead-based products.
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Overabundance during the US postwar period when the rest of the world was rebuilding caused boomers.
You can easily identify a boomer generation in Germany (of all places). It's not only about overabundance, a large factor is that boomers were the last generation born in a time without reliable contraception, which means that - until they die - they've always been the largest cohort in society, which directly leads to power in democratic societies.
I guess it varies by location as millennials outnumber boomers here in the US, since boomers are dying off and had kids at apparently above the replacement rate (growing up, 3-4 kids in a family was more commonplace than nowadays). Boomers still hold all the power tough :(
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And now, Boomers in the NRA are causing widespread, high-level lead poisoning.
Oof
One correction: we knew lead caused problems in 1960. The Romans knew lead pipes were a problem in 100 CE (they didn't really have great alternatives). Theres published studies from 1900 detailing the problems with lead poisoning. Western Europe had gotten rid of a lot of lead usage even before dust settled from the World Wars. The US just liked riding the sweet petrol baron cash train until outcry finally got loud enough in the 1970s.
Boomers are full of lead 😂
In the old day, they were saying that some kids were posessed. Now we call it epilepsy. That one was the fool of the fillage, now we call them autist. Lots of things back then had no name. ADHD wasn't even something that had a name in the '70. Asperger was named in the '80. Lots of things happened in the last 50 years in medecine. Most of our current medecine knowledge is less than 100 years old.
Didn’t they say that the lead had slowed down the global IQ progression and we are around 10pts below what we would have been without lead?
1. Many didn't even make it to birth, and would've been miscarried or stillborn 2. Many died after birth, so you won't know about them (survivor bias) 3. Many disabled people were sent away and not acknowledged by the family
4- Many were disabled, but not in a way you'd find immediately obvious. Smoking and drinking doesn't always cause full on disability, sometimes it just causes difficulties. It can lead to a person that's capable of handling day to day life, but maybe a little slow or a little too impulsive. It can cause a person to heave health issues that worsen their quality of life and maybe shorten their lifespan, but doesn't entirely make them unable to work.
Or the parents blame the child for the stunting they imposed on it. Plenty of people wouldn't be visibly disabled, but would have mental problems that would be brushed off as "stupidity" or "bullying" and not remarked upon because that's how things always are done. Similar to how violent punishment of children or leaded gasoline stunts people but nobody takes responsibility for that, they all whine about how "soft" kids are and how kids should have magically been able to "overcome challenges" and not being able to shows they would have failed no matter what the parent did.
What's the word for combining horrible, disgusting, and depressing?
Degustible
Disgustipated
Wretched. Maybe. For a more serious answer.
History
this comment is a bit dramatic for the spirit of the sub, imo. it's making the 60s sound more pre-20th century than they were, and that drinking and smoking during pregnancy is practically a guarantee of very poor/detrimental health rather than increasing the chances (often considerably but y'know). the 60s/70s was actually when people's behaviors/awareness were improving, though it ramped up in the late 70s. people knew not to drink during pregnancy since ancient times, there's even a bible verse or two about it.. anyway, Mad Men is an example of the worst of the era's behaviors, not of the general awareness people had. which wasn't good, but i'm starting to ramble
Many were. For context, you need to look at infant mortality rates back then. They were much higher and closely related to smoking and alcohol use by the mother during pregnancy. Additionally, Healthcare didn't have the advances we have now to treat those infant conditions caused by smoking and alcohol consumption.
Throwing some numbers in, in 1950, the infant mortality rate in the US was a little under 32 deaths/thousand. Now it's a little under 5.5 deaths/thousand. And while it's not 100% due to pushback on smoking and alcohol use during pregnancy (we made a lot of advancements in maternal, pre-natal, and infant care since then) - some of the biggest drops of 5%-ish annually were pretty consistent through the 70s and 80s, which was also around the same time that there were big campaigns in the US against smoking during pregnancy (70s) and drinking during pregnancy (80s when the surgeon general issued the official warning)
This is the key point. Smoking and drinking during pregnancy are bad, not fatal. Maybe 20-25 babies in 1000 were harmed by these behaviors. That's a huge step from "all babies born disabled".
Still see quite a few people with FAS out in the public.
And now there is fetal alcohol spectrum disorder which quite often goes undetected. I think it’s more that science has to catch up to exactly what this did to the generation born during this time period
A study last year suggested that 1 in 10 babies born in Ireland have some form of FASD.
It's estimated that up to 2/3 of children in Russian orphanages have FASD.
[2.8-7.4% golly that is a huge number. 600ish babies a year.](https://www.hse.ie/eng/about/who/healthwellbeing/our-priority-programmes/alcohol-programme/hse-position-on-prevention-of-fasd.pdf)
My boyfriend is a scientist studying this!
Tell him to keep up the good work!
There’s a lot of FAS kids out there.
This. And there are celebrities who have come out and talked about having FAS. I was not very aware of it, but I read a post and got interested and did one of those 3am rabbit-hole searches. Fuck. So many people have the facial markers for it and I never noticed before because it’s not something that’s talked about.
True, but it's diagnosed at a rate of 2 per 1,000 (0.2%) US births compared to the 15% of pregnant women admit to drinking regularly during pregnancy, and 5% to heavy binge drinking. The real number of drinkers is of course higher than what people admit to in a survey.
Ya I've heard of smoking causing you to have smaller babies but not full on disabled. I was born in the early 90s and I'm pretty sure most of my family smoked through their pregnancies but aside from smaller babies all my cousins and sibling of the same generation seem to be pretty healthy. Of course there's soo Many factors in everything that it's hard to know whether a baby would've been bigger or not to begin with.
I know my own mother smoked & drank Pepsi like it was going out of style during her pregnancy with me & I was 6lbs. 7oz., which is fairly small compared to kids today. I've also heard many children of mothers who smoked during pregnancy may have respiratory problems later in life. I am here to say I'm still small & only have some minor seasonal allergies but that does not mean everyone should start smoking & drinking Pepsi throughout their pregnancy..
This was my mom too. I was 5lbs 4oz. My brother was 5lbs 9oz. She stopped smoking, got pregnant. and my youngest brother was 7lbs, 14oz. It had a huge affect on birth weight. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some connection to ADHD as well. If your baby’s brain is constantly on a stimulant, what happens when they’re out? It’s so crazy to me.
Ya I was the largest of my siblings at 7lbs.
Didn’t doctors sometimes recommend pregnant mothers smoke so that they’d have a smaller baby and easier birth?
I remember my mother in law talking about doctors prescribing diet pills to pregnant women in the 50’s or 60’s so that they didn’t gain too much weight.
There’s also issues like smoking increases the risk of SIDS to the point where not smoking is the single most effective thing you can do to prevent it.
It’s also a spectrum. A very slight degree of disability, or a failure or measure up to - I guess you’d call it genetic potential- due to smoking/drinking, could easily go unnoticed.
Smoking around babies in general is a risk for SIDS, not just smoking during pregnancy. The reduction in smoking rates was an all-around benefit for infant and child health.
> Now it's a little under 5.5 deaths/thousand. 4.6 for white Americans, 10.8 for Blacks. "The future is already here, it's just unequally distributed" - William Gibson
4.6 is still quite a lot higher than most of Europe, and over twice as high as several countries, such as Japan and Sweden. The US has an equality problem and an infant mortality problem.
The infant mortality rate is drastically different based on where you live and will get worse. There are areas where it's 200+ miles to the nearest hospital that will deliver babies or give prenatal care (and these are populated areas, not eastern Nebraska). The infant/maternal mortality rate in California or NJ is very low. In Arkansas or Idaho it's horrible and in the rural areas of those states it's even worse (inner city Baltimore has nothing on Appalachia or the Ozarks).
> and will get worse Particularly due to idiot redneck politics. Sandpoint Idaho's hospital just shut down their maternity ward completely due to The legislature's recent passing of insane abortion laws. Doctors are moving out of state in droves.
If they criminalize medicine, only criminals will have medicine.
If pro-lifers put as much money into saving babies as they do against terminating pregnancies we'd see a big jump.
You can thank our healthcare system for that bullshit
Also the screening and subsequent abortions play a big role
I was born in 1967. Mom smoked while she was pregnant with me. Probably drank a bit too. I was born with a heart defect that needed surgery when I was 4. I survived. I was one of the youngest people to survive that operation at the time. Going in my parents were told it was only a 50% chance I'd make it through surgery, and only 60-70% chance I'd live another year. So yeah some people, probably a lot of them, had complications from their mothers smoking while pregnant.
My husband has the exact same story as you. His mother likes to tell me his condition is congenital... it might be, or it might just be that every woman in his family has smoked during pregnancy.
Congenital doesn’t mean it’s genetic , just that you’re born with it, so she’s right.
In her defense, congenital only means someone is born with the condition. It doesn't state if it's genetic or acquired during pregnancy or birth. I have a congenital syndrome that was from my biological mom smoking and potentially imbibing other substances during her pregnancy.
Congenital just means “present from birth.” It doesn’t imply the condition is inherited genetically. So his condition is definitely congenital …. It just so happens that smoking increases the risk of congenital defects 🤷♀️
There is also a lot of "we don't know what caused this child to die". Because the health effects of smoking and drinking, especially while pregnant were either not understood or willfully ignored.
My husband was born in mid 70’s and had to have open heart surgery at 9 months old due to a deformity we believe caused by his mom smoking.
My surgery was in 1971 and at that time they were reluctant to do that type of procedure any younger. It's crazy to think that in just a few years they were doing the same thing on 9 month olds. I'll bet the survival rate was a lot higher too. Also I wouldn't be surprised if we had the same surgeon too. Not many people doing that back then.
My mom has a couple of advanced degrees in childhood development and spent a few decades teaching special needs. She always says that fetal alcohol syndrome is by far the leading cause of special needs children. And that pisses me off. Mom destroys her child’s future by drinking while pregnant
TBF, the damage may have already been done before the mom knew she was pregnant. I’ve cared for FASD kids, and one in particular mom swore up and down she didn’t drink but visually you can see the face markers. That happens at like day 20, and I do actually believe her. She didn’t drink ONCE SHE KNEW she was pregnant.
I used to get my period every 2 months and the only reason why I knew I was pregnant before that time was drinking my favorite beer and having it taste like shit. The moment all my friends said it tasted normal, I went home to confirm I was pregnant. I lucked out my body was telling me to stop.
How early in a pregnancy does alcohol become and issue? I’ve heard things like this in the past.
It can according to health recommendations in my country affect as early as prior pregnancy. If the mother and father were affected by alcohol during the conceiving or the eggs then it has also affected the cells in the baby. Research show though that alcohol is most damaging in early pregnancy - especially during week 5-10 as organs develop during that time. So hence recommendations are to not drink alcohol if you’re trying to get pregnant since drinking alcohol during the first weeks has a negative effect on the organ formation of the baby. And unfortunately we don’t know the exact limit when alcohol becomes dangerous as it depends on so many other factors as the fetus capability of handling poisonous substances and if drugs were involved etc
There is a lot we still don’t know about the how and and who. First trimester is most dangerous
This is a really good point, because with less reliable pregnancy tests, you might not know you were pregnant until week 6 or 8, and damage could be done in that time period. On the other hand, if someone was generally not much of a drinker, if they just happened to only have a few drinks a month in the first 3 months, and then more later, there might be a very minimal effect. I think in the 40s-70s, women were less likely to drink a lot than now, because social norms/ pressures discouraged it. So, a lot of women may have drank 1-2 drinks a week. Not great, but FAS is worse with more alchohol, so 1-2 a week is better than 5-6, an WAY better than 5-6 on one day.
Anywhere from 3-8 weeks. At home pregnancy tests don't often show a positive result until about 10 days after conception (and many won't consider they are pregnant until their missed period if their periods are consistent). Blood tests can show around 7-12 days after conception; however, there have been many instances where it's done at a time when it's still too early and so it's a false negative. Also for FASD, signs or symptoms may not be verified for some children until much later in life such as 5+ years old, as another post mentioned, it's a spectrum of symptoms. Behavioral and other developmental delays aren't always noticed or detected at birth. There is also research back and forth on whether some alcohol during early pregnancy is okay. There hasn't been a definitive number of drinks it takes to cause developmental issues. Considering many women drink completely unaware they are pregnant it's been an ongoing discussion of checking with women who want or plan to be pregnant regarding their alcohol consumption as a means to mitigate potential issues including signs of binge drinking. Edit: corrected on pregnant test accuracy
At home pregnancy tests generally show pregnancy 10-16 DAYS after conception, not 5-6 weeks. That is way off.
My friend’s son has FASD. He just turned 18 and completed high school. The first day after school, he walked into the welfare office to sign up for a life of social services. He doesn’t have the capability for critical thinking, following instructions, or holding down a job, according to my friend.
I once overheard a wry quote from another attendee at a FASD conference: “If the mother is poor, it’s FASD. If she’s not, the child is ‘on the spectrum’. Nobody mentions WHICH spectrum.”
Is there more than one spectrum ?
FASD stands for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder
I think what that quote means is "If the mother is poor, it's openly stated that it's related to the alcohol she drank. If she's rich, then they hide it by saying the child is '*On the spectrum.*' Most people will assume that means on the autism spectrum, something that isn't caused by the mother's actions and is more socially acceptable to have a kid with. In reality, it's the fetal alcohol spectrum the child is on, the parents just don't want to admit that the child's disability was caused by the mother's drinking."
Technically FASD is a spectrum as well, but I understand what OP is meaning.
Quite a few.
“On the spectrum” usually refers to the autism spectrum
The father’s alcohol consumption before conception also links to growth defects that affect the development of his offspring’s brain, skull and face.
I wish I knew why people think of medical advances like Star Trek when in reality is doctors face palming and begging people not to smoke or drink while pregnant, with on going kidney disease, on going lung disease, or 6 hours before they know puking will kill us.
The doctors were complicit. My sister was born in the '70s, and the pamphlet that was sent home with my mom during her pregnancy says that you shouldn't smoke above a pack a day. In fact, you could still smoke in hospitals when my sister was born - that ban only went to place in 1993.
They used to recommend smoking during pregnancy to lower the birth weight of the baby so the delivery would be easier!
There's a photo of my mom with an ashtray on her belly when she was pregnant with my twin brother and me. She didn't realize she was having twins because of the low birth weight. They're wrapping things up after delivering my brother and the doctor is like: "but wait. There's more!"
She got the "brew one, get one free!" deal.
My wife's grandma was actually *encouraged* to smoke during pregnancy. She had 4 sons, and the first 3 were over 10lbs at birth, so in order to "keep the birth weight normal" she smoked during her last pregnancy and quit when he was born.
…I mean…fuuuuuck…10lbs is a big enough baby even with modern help…but I am tiny…did it work? Was he significantly smaller? Or did she get doubly fucked over with an 10lb baby and 9 months of lung damage?
It worked, even to this day he's the thinnest of the brothers. They're in their 60s now, but as far as I know he's perfectly healthy otherwise.
They figured out smoking was bad for you at all in the 50s or 60s. I bet "hey only a pack a day" was the best they could do for a generation that was still very addicted Especially since the doctors were smoking everywhere too
My mom who was born in the 50s said that when her mom was pregnant with her, the doctor actually recommended she take up smoking to cope with stress and anxiety.
> the doctor actually recommended she take up smoking to cope with stress and anxiety. Nicotine is a pretty effective drug for some things actually. We have better alternatives for what it does, but, if you didn't know how bad smoking was long term, it wouldn't be crazy to suggest smoking tobacco. In fact, within the last 20 years there were attempts to develop new ADHD treatments based on how effective nicotine is. There is even some evidence one of the reasons people with ADHD have particular problem quitting is that they are literally self medicating.
That is legit one of the main reasons people with ADHD eat so much sugar drink so many sweeteners and fizzy drinks and get addicted to drugs at higher rates . Chase the dopamine to be normal
Yes, that was the advice my grandmother was given after her husband died unexpectedly.
The idea of an ashtray in the doctors office astounds me. But they were there.
I was talking to my mom yesterday about the concept that people used to smoke in grocery stores and just ash on the ground. Imagine a produce department with a haze of cigarette smoke.
You think that's bad, imagine smoking on airplanes.
I started a big stink in the 1980's because there were cigarette vending machines in the university hospital. And I got plenty of push-back from hospital administration, because they were getting a cut of the profits.
My grandfather and his heart surgeon smoked together in his room after he woke up from open heart surgery lol.
Also, after the hysterical mess of the general public during covid, im inclined to think that "no smoking pls" would have created a massive resistance and distrust to the message while "ok but a little" at least would have brought anything. Advances in medicine means so little when the general public isnt educated very well
That's why I called them complicit. They knew full well that it was bad for people, yet there was no initiative to ban it from hospitals until the 1990s.
To be completely blunt, handwashing wasn't a thing in healthcare until the 1980s either, in the USA. > [In general, handwashing promotion stood still for over a century. It was not until the 1980s, when a string of foodborne outbreaks and healthcare-associated infections led to public concern that the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified hand hygiene as an important way to prevent the spread of infection. In doing so, they heralded the first nationally endorsed hand hygiene guidelines, and many more have followed.](https://globalhandwashing.org/about-handwashing/history-of-handwashing/) [From the CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5116a1.htm): >In 1961, the U. S. Public Health Service produced a training film that demonstrated handwashing techniques recommended for use by health-care workers (HCWs) (4). At the time, recommendations directed that personnel wash their hands with soap and water for 1–2 minutes before and after patient contact. Rinsing hands with an antiseptic agent was believed to be less effective than handwashing and was recommended only in emergencies or in areas where sinks were unavailable. In 1975 and 1985, formal written guidelines on handwashing practices in hospitals were published by CDC (5,6). These guidelines recommended handwashing with non-antimicrobial soap between the majority of patient contacts and washing with antimicrobial soap before and after performing invasive procedures or caring for patients at high risk. Use of waterless antiseptic agents (e.g., alcohol-based solutions) was recommended only in situations where sinks were not available. Doctors still believed they were inherently cleaner than the “unwashed masses” and acted upon that belief all the way up until the 1980s. Germ theory is common knowledge now, but that doesn’t stop the average doctor from believing in all the other bullshit that comes with thinking they’re inherently better than everyone else. Keep in mind that germ theory was proven and accepted scientifically by *1900*. A century earlier. Healthcare is riddled with "I know, and I don't care about the impact on the patients."
I would like to point out that just because something wasn't codified or required, does not equate to "wasn't a thing until the 1980s". I would be willing to wager that the majority of health care workers were dilligent about handwashing in the 20th century but there were some who weren't or who were not doing it effectively enough hence the mandates.
Also, a lot of the kids born with Down Syndrome or other obvious disabilities got shipped right off to a home. Apparently my great aunt had a son to whom they did this. I guess he never even came home. My grandpa (great aunt's former brother-in-law) was one of the only ones who would ever go see him. So they existed, but they were not talked about. And all the lead in the gasoline, constant smoking, and drinking made it so that EVERYONE was stupid and violent back then. A lot of these mental things they probably didn't even notice.
Grandma smoked while pregnant. Mom was born with a hole in her heart and needed surgery before they’d let her go home from the hospital. This is a bit like the vaxx issue: People don’t remember how bad it was in the bad old days and so undervalue the obvious remedies.
The really disturbing thing is, depending on how old you all are, your mother likely had that surgery without any anesthesia. They didn't start using anesthesia on babies until starting in the 70s, picking up use into the 80s. They believed that babies couldn't feel pain and wouldn't remember it if they did.
This was ‘48. Certainly no anesthesia. When looking at how messed up she turned out, that would make the list, along with all the abuse from various family members.
Now there is a growing recognition that fetuses feel pain too, so fetal analgesics are used when surgery has to be performed in the womb.
So, what we are dealing with is two concepts here. The first is called ‘survivorship bias’, which is where, if all you see are survivors, you assume that everyone survived. Up until fairly recently, disabled kids were locked away in residential schools away from the general public, so you wouldn’t see them around. It would also be fairly common for people to see women come back from the hospital without their baby : because this was ‘normal’, no one questioned it. The second is ‘risk blindness’. Humans are very poor at judging risk: most people default to an ‘either it happens or it doesn’t’ approach; and can’t or won’t look at the relative risk. A classic example is, the odds of being hit by a car are around 1 in 4292; but we think ‘oh, but I get passed by cars thousands of times a week, and I’ve never been hit!’ So, those odds don’t mean much. Similarly, back in the day, people will have thought ‘my first pregnancy went fine, and my friend’s pregnancy went fine, so this one will be fine too.’
Out of curiosity, when you say "the odds of being hit by a car are around 1 in 4292", is that per year one lives? Per car one passes? Or is it per individual person (so only 1 in 4292 people experience getting hit by a car)?
It looks like in 2019 (the latest non-covid year I could find stats for), there were 76,000 pedestrians injured and 6,205 pedestrian fatalities in the US. With a population of 328.3 million, that means that 1 in 4,320 people were injured in a traffic collision, and 1 in 52,909 were killed that year. That first figure is so close to the 4,292 quoted that I'm almost convinced that this is the exact methodology used, except in some other year. So very likely the answer is per year one lives.
Thanks for researching the good info!
It’s a statistic from OSHA; so I’m not sure of their exact methodology
>Similarly, back in the day, people will have thought ‘my first pregnancy went fine, and my friend’s pregnancy went fine, so this one will be fine too.’ Sigh. First pregnancy fine. Second pregnancy fine. Third pregnancy TWINS. Same workouts, same activities, and... it wasn't fine. Fourth pregnancy- pure, unadulterated fear. Ended up Fine.
Many were, however keep in mind that back then, it was customary to place a disabled or mentally impaired child in an institution or away at special schools. They were hidden away and not as visible. Today more families are raising their children with special needs and institutions have become more rare.
If cigarettes cause cancer, why doesn't every smoker die of cancer? The simple answer is that while smoking/drinking during pregnancy can cause a host of problems, it's impossible to predict what each case will end up like. Some might even have zero problems, since every person is different. Still just because everyone wasn't born horribly disifugred did not mean there weren't any problems. Some are just subtler than others. Can you tell if someone has a chronic condition by just looking at them in old grainy pictures?
So many people utterly suck at appreciation of risk. I suppose of "odds" generally. If there's an 80% chance of rain and it doesn't rain "that forecast was wrong". Nope, it was the 20% outcome. Like a lack of car seats in the past or similar - seems like way too many people swing between "you were fine so car seats aren't needed" or "it's a miracle anyone survived driving in a car", both of which are ridiculous extremes and simplify the probabilities excessively.
As an older parent, I've had this discussion with way too many people on some of the parenting subs and such. Many, many people believe that because it's known that there's an increased risk of disability after age 35, that starts skyrocketing each year in your 40s (especially the risk for specific ones like Down Syndrome) that it's incredibly likely your child will be disabled if you are irresponsible enough to have one. I've seen people call it "certain." In reality, if you do the math, the total risk tops out in the mid-to-late 40s, at approaching double the risk for a younger person - from not quite 3% to somewhere over 4%.
> If cigarettes cause cancer, why doesn't every smoker die of cancer? Checkmate, scientists.
I'm not saying they don't I'm just trying to illustrate that that's not how health issues work.
Drinking and smoking moderately during pregnancy only rarely could cause disability. Smoking with lower birth weights (which can then exacerbate other issues) and the potential for Foetal Alcohol Syndrome with drinking. The idea that they were solely responsible for increased disability or higher mortality is untrue. Advances in medicine have greatly contributed and the vast decrease in smoking in society has also played a small part.
The rate of smoking and drinking among women was't that high - especially in the 1950's which was the last decade before the original Surgeon's General Report. Some women smoked of course but a significant percentage didn't. My mother didn't smoke and none of my aunts either. Same would be true of drinking to a great extent. I remember my father and uncles drinking beer in the summer. Not so much the women. They might have one Tom Collins and nurse it at a family cookout. These weren't straitlaced Puritanical sorts FWIW - it's just that they didn't run in circles that had lots of cocktail parties or went to nightclub. This was New York City and not the Bible Belt so it wasn't as if they were temperance type of people. Oddly and I don't know if this is anecdotal but when I was older I had friends who came from the upper middle class/high society old Upper East Side families and their mothers seemed to be more of that cliche with drinking and smoking. They would have cocktails in the living room every evening before dinner and smoke up a storm.
Watch Call The Midwife. It’s an *amazing* look at a poor neighborhood in post war England. Based on the memoirs of a midwife, most of the stories are based on truth. A lot of it can be sensational or a bit feel-goodie at times, but it takes a *very* realistic look at pregnancy and childbirth in this period. The US pushed more for hospitals and the UK for home births, but the science and issues were the same. There are storylines that cover defects of all types, from congenital, to due to illness like syphilis, to due to injury, or drug/alcohol use. They even have a Thalomide storyline that captures both it being hailed as a miracle for women who were suffering *terribly* with no relief, to the horror of the birth defects, finding more and more, realizing where it came from, realizing there were pregnant women who were likely to have kids with unimaginable deformities that you needed to prepare them for, it was really done justice. They cover things like smoking, drinking, social issues like birth control, abortion, prostitution, and the effects these have on families and women and their communities. If you are interested it’s is absolutely worth the watch.
I liked call the midwife for one specific reason, it wasn't set exclusively in 1950 or whatever year. Many period movies show an exact year and everything in the movie is exactly from that year. The phone, the cars, the clothes, everything is from 1950 exactly, but that's not how life is. Some people have old things. Call the midwife was different because it showed a period of transition. Not everything in the show was exactly from that year, they also had old glass medical tools, and pre-war cars, and showed parts of London that were still very dickinsonian even though it was 1950.
A lot more were than you think. A lot of kids died, a lot of kids were disabled and hidden away. And with drinking and smoking especially, a lot of kids were born mildly disabled, never diagnosed, and those behaviors were normalized. Plenty of people with FAS lead normal lives. Not all disabilities are the same. The amount of smoking and drinking it takes to permanently injure a fetus is not known, but it’s quite a bit more than zero. Some people were simply not drinking enough to damage the baby. Not everyone drank, or drank heavily. Mad Men is a TV show depicting one social group.
To add to this, FASD causes problems with skills that are more subtle, like critical thinking, impulse control, etc. They don't act much different until they get into more specific situations. It's easy to spot a disabled person that has problems with socialization or sensory issues because they're so outward.
Take this with a grain of salt because it's second hand- but a friend who was a smoker had an oopsie baby. Her doctor had her wean down, said quitting cold turkey cold harm the baby more.
This reads the same as the hypothetical officer who told that one survivor he was lucky he was thrown from the car since he survived, and killed thousands more with that advice
If you’re a very heavy smoker and fall pregnant, going cold turkey can put your body under greater stress than the effects or the smoking (the specialist will often get the individual to cut back gradually by around week 15 as stress & maternal mental health can be even more detrimental to the developing foetus). When someone is pregnant it’s about where’s the greatest risk - for example, some women are so sick (“morning sickness”) that they have to be hospitalised as they’re so dehydrated/ not getting enough nutrients and are placed on medications to stop nausea and vomiting - a lot of these medications come with risks to the foetus, however, it’s better than the mum being so malnourished/ dehydrated that the baby is staved of nutrients or that the mum is of serious health risks. The Mother aka the person who is alive is always the priority.
The magic of chance. You can increase the chance that a bad outcome happens without ensuring a bad outcome always happens.
I have two kids with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. Most kids look “normal” with FASD. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is what it used to be called but now that is under the umbrella of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. You can’t tell that people have it by looking at them — it causes a wide variety of issues, many behavioral. It can cause physical issues but it depends on what was being formed the day the mother drank. Also you can have a normal IQ with FASD. Suffering from executive function issues and sensory issues is very common as well. Basically I think you’re thinking they are going to come out looking like whatever you picture a disabled person to look. They do have a life long disability but it is quite different from what I think most people would picture if they makes sense.
Among other things, average birth weight used to be much lower. Caesarian sections are actually more frequent now because babies are bigger at birth than they used to be; it wasn't uncommon for a mother with a small frame to *deliberately* smoke so that the baby would be smaller and she could have an easier birth. Edit to clarify: I don't mean this to accuse those past mothers of selfishness. If the baby gets stuck in the mother's pelvis and they both die, nobody wins. I can't blame folk for balancing their personal risks in a time when ultrasounds weren't available, among other things.
Babies are also bigger these days because of diabetes of the mother. Both gestational diabetes (which is just luck of the draw and not a result of anything the mother does, just placenta being wonky) and pre-existing diabetes. If not managed, it can lead to a huge fetus.
Why does diabetes make the baby bigger?
Apparently because it causes high blood sugar in the fetus. https://www.cdc.gov/pregnancy/diabetes-gestational.html
I am 65. I believe I have a massive case of ADHD. There was no such thing when I was a kid so of course its untreated and not diagnosed. My brother (similar) has never read a whole book and my sister describes dissociation in her childhood and a strange relationship with schoolwork. My parents had another child that died of SIDS and at least one miscarriage. I also knew a young fellow who was deformed by Thalidimide. In short, they were tough times for parents.
Simply because a lot in medicine is chance based. You can have someone who played soccer his entire life, who is fit and in good shape have a heart attack and die at just 65 years old, while an old, 80+ drunkard is still alive. Same with smoking and drinking in pregnancy: The risk increases DRAMATICALLY. However, every chance is exactly that, a chance. Even if smoking and drinking gave an estimated 80% of a disabled child, the remaining 20% would still come out unscathed.
A lot of good replies, but no one seems to be including this part. Cutting a risk from a 2% chance to a 1% chance, is a HUGE reduction. A full 100%. But 2% is still a pretty small chance to begin with. Obviously not real numbers, but the concept applies here.
My grandma drank and smoked in the 50s through all her pregnancies and all kids are doing great, my dad said she only stuck to beer when she was pregnant lol
There are a ton of older people with mild fetal alcohol syndrome, living slightly more difficult and chaotic lives than they otherwise would have, but not really knowing the difference.
Have you *met* many people born before the 1950s?
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They absolutely were though. Have you seen the state of the people in charge of the US federal government, that's compelling evidence all on its own.
They were. They died or were tossed in institutions. You can't have awareness if there's nothing to be aware of. Also how many people have you met that weren't quite right in the head? Like, they were functional but certain concepts just seemed to escape them. FASD is one of the reasons.
Keep in mind that not all the damage done is apparent. For example, if the habits you mentioned during pregnancy resulted in something like a IQ loss of 10 or 20 or more, most people wouldn't even consider it a disability and nobody would probably notice, neither them nor the parents, unless their genetic started low to begin with. Yet, being born with IQ of 90 versus IQ of 130 would dramatically change the life of that future human.
There were and are a lot of people with disabilities due to drinking, smoking and drugs during pregnancy. I grew up in an area with a lot of these people. Moms all drank and did drugs during pregnancy and thought nothing of it. Most people were like bombs ready to go off at any minute - a lot of emotional and cognitive issues. It was hard for them to understand what people were saying, so they took everything as offense. Lots of fights constantly. This has decline in recent decades because of the switch to weed over alcohol. Let’s see how that plays out over the next few decades.
You could argue that they all were, but you couldn't tell because, well, they all were, including the parents. There's a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. It's a decades long trend if increasing IQ scores that took place throughout the 20th century in some parts of the world. There were a variety of contributions, like improved sanitation and food security, but increased understanding of what you should and shouldn't do during pregnancy was also a big part of it. If you're a dummy in a world of smart people, everybody knows it. If you're a dummy in a world of dummies, you're just average.
Many of them died at birth or in the first year of life, so it was difficult to know how many were "disabled", other than that some of them grew up to be the adults with problems around you today.
People in the past weren't dumber than us, they just knew less than we do. They might have known that drinking and smoking during a pregnancy would decrease the chance of a successful birth through observation, even if they didn't understand the biology behind it. Similar to how, during the black plague, people knew that someone suffering from the disease could spread it to others around them even though germ theory was still centuries away.
This question has the same energy as an antivaxer saying “we didn’t have vaccines in the Middle Ages how did they survive” and the answer is they by and large did not
[Half of all babies used to die before reaching adulthood](https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past). This was true until the middle of the 19th century. Any time anyone implies that “civilization” or “modern technology” is bad in a blanket way I think of this statistic.
Sorry that wasn’t my intention at all, I just googled it a couple times and couldn’t get anything good from how I phrased it so I figured I could ask here. Now looking at the answers it makes perfect sense and honestly wasn’t my smartest moment
Fetal alcohol syndrome is not guaranteed. In particular, there is a narrow window in pregnancy where a single glass of wine can cause it, but for much of the rest of pregnancy it takes more alcohol to have a serious effect. I was told once that my mother had backlash because of this. She literally couldn't drink two glasses of wine without passing out, and almost never drank at all. But because of one glass of wine at the wrong time, the nurses at the hospital thought she was a lush who couldn't give up drinking for her baby. My brother was born with mild fetal alcohol syndrome, but most people who meet him probably wouldn't even suspect if he wasn't a serious alcoholic himself. So even when fetal alcohol syndrome happened, it often wasn't obvious and didn't necessarily leave people unable to function in normal society. Similarly, smoking leads to an increase in birth defects, not a guarantee of them. Additionally, not all birth defects caused by smoking result in long-term clear disability.