From the New England Journal of Medicine, March 24, 2005
The author, a history professor, reviews the responses of medical, political, and legal institutions to the fetal alcohol syndrome. Leaving the biomedical discussion to standard medical textbooks, she focuses in this book on a social context beyond the consulting room. Golden recounts the reluctance of physicians and society to accept alcohol as a teratogen, in spite of warnings dating back centuries. For example, Josef Warkany's monumental 1971 work on congenital malformations did not indict alcohol nor even include it in the index (the complete syndrome includes malformations of the face, viscera, and brain). The concept of a fetal alcohol syndrome emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, during a revolutionary expansion of knowledge about teratogenesis. It was the era of the realization that "the face predicts the brain," when physicians recognized many face-brain malformation syndromes and correlated them with abnormal karyotypes or exogenous teratogens. Golden points out that wide publicity about thalidomide-induced phocomelia had primed the profession to expect the identification of other teratogens in humans. She reviews the polarized debates among religionists, feminists, and legislators as to whether to consider maternal alcoholism, with its potential for harming the fetus, as a moral failure or a disease that requires compassionate treatment. Should the law punish an alcoholic mother? Is the harmed child justified in suing her? Is brain impairment due to the fetal alcohol syndrome a justifiable defense for a criminal or, as attorney Alan Dershowitz contends, an "abuse excuse" that replaces personal responsibility with a diagnostic label? In the debate over "medicalizing" deviancies such as alcoholism and compulsive gambling as sicknesses, I would hope that physicians would prefer medicalization to punishment. Because each new discovery opens a Pandora's box of reactions, physicians need to find effective means of public education that will elicit productive responses from society. In this area, Golden highlights the shortcomings of the news media, government agencies, and the courts and points to the resistance of manufacturers to publicizing warnings that raise liability concerns or that may result in controversial legislation. Golden writes clearly, though occasionally repetitiously, and provides abundant references. She avoids personal polemics and evangelizing. Her modus operandi is to quote opposing viewpoints in their historical context and then underline contradictions. At times the reader may almost wish for recommendations, but Golden eschews easy answers. Most physicians and health workers will find the book interesting and provocative and will come away with a much fuller appreciation of the complex responses that medical discoveries trigger in society. These are excellent outcomes for a book.
William DeMyer, M.D.Copyright © 2005 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.
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Book Description
"A generation has passed since a physician first noticed that women who drank heavily while pregnant gave birth to underweight infants with disturbing tell-tale characteristics. Women whose own mothers enjoyed martinis while pregnant now lost sleep over a bowl of rum raisin ice cream. In
Message in a Bottle, Janet Golden charts the course of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) through the courts, media, medical establishment, and public imagination.
Long considered harmless during pregnancy (doctors even administered it intravenously during labor), alcohol, when consumed by pregnant women, increasingly appeared to be a potent teratogen and a pressing public health concern. Some clinicians recommended that women simply moderate alcohol consumption; others, however, claimed that there was no demonstrably safe level for a developing fetus, and called for complete abstinence. Even as the diagnosis gained acceptance and labels appeared on alcoholic beverages warning pregnant women of the danger, FAS began to be de-medicalized in some settings. More and more, FAS emerged in court cases as a viable defense for people charged with serious, even capital, crimes and their claims were rejected.
Golden argues that the reaction to FAS was shaped by the struggle over women's relatively new abortion rights and the escalating media frenzy over ""crack"" babies. It was increasingly used as evidence of the moral decay found within marginalized communities--from inner-city neighborhoods to Indian reservations. With each reframing, FAS became a currency traded by politicians and political commentators, lawyers, public health professionals, and advocates for underrepresented minorities, each pursuing separate aims.
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