There are few greater causes for celebration than a brand new baby, but one Polish mother started her celebrating a bit early, showing up at the delivery room with a blood alcohol level of 0.12, which would be the equivalent of drinking an entire bottle of wine.
At birth, the baby's blood alcohol level was 0.29, a level she should not even be close to attaining until well into her college years. The drunk mother could face up to five years in prison because of the celebration (or self-medication, whichever the case might be) for child endangerment.
I've known several people who drank before they even knew they were pregnant and the guilt over possibly harming the development of fetus they didn't realize was there was crushing. I can't imagine purposely getting drunk knowing full well that the baby is partaking everything you are.
Doctors say so far the baby appears fine and I hope for the child's sake she suffers no ill effects from her mother's poor judgment.















1. Wow -- and my shock is not only toward a very pregnant woman getting herself intoxicated. This information about the comparative blood alcohol levels of the mother and baby is rather surprising to me, as much literature about ingesting alcohol during pregnancy suggests that very little actually reaches the baby, while the tests done on these two shows that the baby's blood alcohol level was more than double his or her mother's, and possibly hours after the mother's was taken (depending on how much time lapsed between her checking into the hospital and the baby's delivery). While I indulged a glass of wine every few months during my past pregnancy, this hard evidence into the issue is probably enough to curb my craving in any future pregnancies.
Posted at 2:57PM on Jun 11th 2008 by kerrielynbaldwin