LogFAQs > #955352130

It's a tricky question. At one level, yeah, it's bad that people hurt their babies like that. Assigning punishment for it, though, effectively means you're criminalizing alcoholism/drug addiction or forcing certain women to get abortions, and neither is a particularly good way to handle things (especially when so many states are actively trying to make abortions harder to get, so that'd just boil down to punishing addicts for getting pregnant). That's especially true where most of the harm done in the case of FASD happens because of drinking in the first trimester, often before many women even know they're pregnant. In any case, then primary behavioural change you'll see from punishments is alcoholic/drug addicted mothers avoiding medical care (possibly including the delivery itself) for fear of being caught with a FASD/NAD baby, which is just plain dangerous for everyone involved.

Instead, solving this problem has to be focused on helping potential mothers avoid it. Rehab and other addiction supports, subsidies to make birth control more available (to people in general, though especially to people with substance abuse problems), better education around the issue... In general, there's a lot of push to punish mothers that are perceived to have done something wrong (criminal charges for FASD, banning abortions to force them to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term...), but most of that comes from a sense of anger over the perceived wrong, rather than because punishment is actually an effective tool for changing behaviour. Making it easier to not make the mistake, however, does improve that outcome.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Is it the infant that's abstinent? The name of the condition seems contradictory to me since public schooling in the 90's have conditioned me to associate abstinence with not having sex. In which case there shouldn't be an infant.

Abstinence is simply the state of abstaining from something. Colloquially, it's usually talking about sex, and that's the most common context you're going to hear it in, but you can just as easily abstain from meat, or smooth jazz, or cocaine.

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