A couple of week ago, I wrote a column about the cost of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder to our society and to the children involved. The column spoke about the damage done by a mother’s drinking during pregnancy.
I got a very interesting e-mail soon after that column ran asking why the father was not mentioned at all in it. The writer wanted to know where the father was and why society was not holding him as responsible as the mother, why society was not blaming and shaming him the way a mother is.
The writer asks very good questions for which there are not very many good answers. The reality is that our society, and most societies in the world today, holds a mother primarily responsible for her children and their upbringing. In fact, most societies hold women responsible for what happens to them even if it was against their will.
We have a prime example of that in Nigeria where a mother was scheduled to be stoned to death after she weaned her child because the child was born out of wedlock. The father was not prosecuted because the judges said there was no evidence he did it. The idea of DNA matching apparently never occurred to them.
There are some countries in this world where a woman who is pregnant through rape faces ostracism and death despite the violence perpetrated on her that resulted in the pregnancy. She is still viewed as the person bringing disgrace on her family – not the man who raped her.
So holding a woman solely responsible for the damage done to her unborn child when she drinks through a pregnancy is not all that unusual. But just because it’s done, doesn’t make it right.
I actually interviewed a father who proudly told me how he beat his wife up when she tried to drink while pregnant. The father readily admitted he was drunk at the time. To his way of thinking, she was the one pregnant so she had to stay sober while he sat there and got wasted.
Now anyone who doesn’t drink and has ever gone to a party where alcohol was flowing freely can tell you that there is little that is more unattractive than watching people’s faces melt as they get drunker and drunker while you sit there sober. If you are a pregnant woman with an alcohol addiction watching your husband getting drunk, and knowing that there is a good chance he’s going to turn mean and hit you when he is drunk, the incentive to drink far outweighs the incentive to stay sober. The baby might be months away but the man sitting across from you is drunk right now.
Many fathers feel they are doing the right thing by insisting that their pregnant wives or girlfriends stay sober during the pregnancy even though they are not willing to stay sober themselves. They do not see their behavior as making it more difficult for her to stay sober.
It is the underlying premise of all sobriety programs that no one can make you stop drinking. You have to want to stop or the treatment will be minimally successful at best. There is no doubt this is true.
But it is also true that your chance of achieving sobriety is much greater if you have the sober support of your family and loved ones. It’s hard enough to stay sober in a world where liquor is so readily available. Its almost impossible if you are in a home where drinking is the past time of choice for the other adults there.
Many women who achieve sobriety during their pregnancy are faced with the unpalatable choice of either the very high risk of resuming drinking if they return home to their drinking partner or trying to raise a child alone because they can’t go home to him.
Men do play a critical role in the prevalence of FASD in our society. There is no doubt about that. There may be no physical evidence yet that ties their drinking to birth defects passed through their sperm, but there is a world of evidence that their lack of support for their pregnant partner’s sobriety can be the critical difference in whether that child comes into the world whole and is raised in a sober, loving home or comes into the world damaged and enters a home of alcohol fueled violence and neglect.
Fathers are critical in this process. They just aren’t the ones who get pregnant so society seems to let them off the hook. It shouldn’t.