2. History of Alcohol Effects in Pregnancy
The history of maternal alcoholism and its effect on development of the offspring goes back to the
Bible and to the early Greek mythology. Samuel the prophet forbids Samson's mother from drinking
wine during her pregnancy because she is going to give birth to a child blessed by God with special
power, and the bridal couple, in Carthage, was forbidden to drink wine in the wedding night to prevent
a birth of a defective child. In 1834 a report to the House of Commons indicated that some of the
alcoholic mothers gave birth to "a starved, shrivelled and imperfect look" infants and in 1900 Sullivan
reported an increase in the rate of abortions and stillbirth as well as increased frequency of epilepsy
among live-born infants of chronic alcohol abusing women [3]. The teratogenic effects of ethanol on
human fetuses were first reported by Lemoine et al. in 1968, describing a common pattern of birth
defects in 127 children born to alcoholic mothers in France. This included growth deficiency,
psychomotor retardation, low IQ, and atypical EEG [4]. Alcohol was used at the time to prevent
premature labor. However, in these women alcohol was given in rather late phases of pregnancy, post the organogenetic period and therefore resulted in no morphologic changes and apparently only very
little (if at all) effects on behavior. Although the adverse/harmful effects of alcohol use during
pregnancy have been suggested for decades, it was rather difficult to formally document or diagnose
the constellation of problems observed in these children, not until guidelines for fetal alcohol
syndrome (FAS) were established [5].