EFFECTS OF MATERNAL DRINKING ON CHILD DEVELOPMENT: AN INTRODUCTORY REVIEW

Four years ago, a t the 197 1 National Council on Alcoholism Conference, “Nature and Nurture in Alcoholism,” Ullelandl reported observations on 12 infants born to alcoholic mothers. Ten of the 12 had birth weights below the 10th percentile, with eight of them below the third percentile. When 10 of these 12 infants were subsequently evaluated, five had retarded development, and three others were borderline. This report was followed by two others published in 1973 by Jones et a/. 2.3 They described 1 I unrelated children born to alcoholic women of three different ethnic groups who demonstrated similar patterns of retarded growth and development and craniofacial, limb, and cardiovascular defects. This constellation of anomalies was termed the fetal alcohol syndrome. These clinical reports have revived interest in very old observations. In 1621, Burton,4 in the Anatomy of Melancholy cited Aristotle’s observation that “foolish and drunken and harebrained women most often bring forth children like unto themselves, morose and languid.” In 1720, England lifted restrictions on distillation, and cheap gin flooded the country. In 1726, soon after the onset of the “gin epidemic,” the College of Physicians reported to Parliament that parental drinking is “a cause of weak, feeble and distempered children.” Morris,s in 1759, attributed the drop in birthrate and the increase in sickly and inviable infants to parental alcoholism (see FIGURE I) . Trotter6 wrote in 1813, “Can it be too gross to suppose the organs of generation must equally suffer in both sexes from frequent intoxication, and if offspring should be unfortunately derived from such a parentage can we doubt that it must be diseased and puny in its corporeal part and beneath the standard of a rational being in its intellectual facilities?” Morel,’ in 1857, published an elaborate theory of degeneracy which stated that parental drunkenness produced depravity, alcoholic excess, and degeneration in the first generation of offspring and progressively more severe symptoms in their children, until the fourth generation developed sterility, which caused extinction of the line. Later, in the 19th century, journals, such as f i e Journol of Inebriety and The Scientific Temperance Journal, contained many reports of parental drinking that resulted in epilepsy, insanity, moral imbeciles, and alcoholics. Sullivan,* in 1899, critically reviewed a series of observations in which alcoholic parentage was causally related to a variety of mental and behavioral problems. He stressed that “parental drunkenness is one of the most easily traced antecedants, it tends to figure disproportionately among the causes assigned in such inquiries. To avoid this source of fallacy and to estimate more truly the importance of parental alcoholism among the factors which make for the deterioration of the stock, it is desirable to adopt an opposite standpoint and to take as the end of investigation not alcoholism in the ancestry of the degenerate but degeneracy in the descendants of the alcoholic.” Sullivan studied 120 female inebriates who bore 600 children and also compared mortality rates of the offspring of 21 drunken mothers who bore 125 children with mortality rates of the offspring of their nondrinking female relatives.