Pregnancy

A father's alcohol consumption has long been overshadowed by the focus on what a mother drinks. But that could be about to change following more research.

For more than 50 years, scientists have warned about the risks of drinking alcohol in pregnancy. Recent research has found that a mother's consumption of as little as one drink a week may affect a child's brain development, cognitive function and behavior, and facial shape. For decades, public health campaigns have repeatedly said that there's no safe amount of alcohol for moms to drink while pregnant.

But as the risks of maternal alcohol consumption have become better documented, another potential contributing factor to FASD (fetal alcohol spectrum disorder) has remained largely overlooked: how much the father drinks.

Researcher Michael Golding at Texas A&M University studies alcohol exposure and fetal development. He said, "For years now, we've been hearing stories from women who said, 'I never drank during pregnancy, but now I have an FAS kid – and my male partner was a chronic alcohol abuser." But such stories often were dismissed as mothers being forgetful, if not outright lying.

However, recent research raises an intriguing possibility: these mothers were right all along. The idea that a father's alcohol consumption before conception could have an impact on the offspring may seem far-fetched. But recent population studies have found that babies whose fathers drank are at a higher risk for various poor health outcomes.

Based on the research so far, how much alcohol is "safe" for a father to drink if he knows his partner may conceive? We don't have that data. Still, he says, "If it were my sons, I would tell them to stop drinking altogether."

While the exact impact of paternal drinking has yet to be teased out, researchers agree on one thing. “There's this enormous burden that's been placed on women. But male health is important to fetal development. There is a responsibility of both parties here to support and provide for the health of the baby.”

Pro-life advocates saw the 2022 Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as a turning point in the fight against abortion in the United States. After the court overturned Roe v. Wade and removed federal protection for the procedure, some conservative states began introducing fetal personhood laws, granting the unborn the same rights as full-born children.

But Hannah Strege watched it all unfold with another vulnerable group in mind: frozen embryos. In this new era, would they have rights? If they did, would anyone respect them?

Strege, 24, was conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 1996 and frozen for two years. In 1997, she and 19 of her siblings were adopted in embryo form by John and Marlene Strege. They were shipped by FedEx to a local fertility clinic. Hannah was the only embryo to survive thawing and to successfully implant in Marlene’s uterus. She was born in December 1998.

Since Hannah was born, the number of frozen embryos sitting in storage in the United States has risen from roughly 100,000 to an estimated 1.5 million. Many of these embryos remain from IVF treatments, indefinitely chilled in canisters of liquid nitrogen with no plans for their future.

Some clinics feel overwhelmed by the growing volume of embryos sitting in storage and doctors may create dozens of embryos per patient. One doctor told NBC News in 2019 that some patients have 40–60 eggs retrieved in a cycle, and “the embryologist gets the orders from her doctor to inseminate all of them—and the question isn’t asked if the patient even wants that many inseminated. … Nobody’s going to have 30 kids.”

One Florida reproductive endocrinologist said, “We were not prepared for any of this. Twenty-one percent of our embryos have been abandoned.”

After celebrating his national championship as the head football coach for the Michigan Wolverines, Jim Harbaugh made a surprise appearance at the March for Life in Washington D.C. Harbaugh truly lives out his pro-life convictions. In 2022, he told ESPN about encouraging his players to come to him if they ever dealt with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy with a partner. He said he wanted them to know that he’d be happy to raise the baby with his wife.

I’ve told (them) the same thing I tell my kids, boys, the girls, same thing I tell our players, our staff members. I encourage them — if they have a pregnancy that wasn’t planned, to go through with it, go through with it. Let that unborn child be born, and if at that time, you don’t feel like you can care for it, you don’t have the means or the wherewithal, then Sarah and I will take that baby. … We got a big house. We’ll raise that baby.

When asked by the media if it was appropriate for him to share his views on the issue, Harbaugh replied:

We need to talk about it. It’s too big an issue to not give real serious consideration to. What kind of person would you be if you didn’t stand up for what you believe in and didn’t fight tooth and nail for it? I believe in letting the unborn be born.

How many times have you heard expectant couples say, "Well, as long as our baby is healthy"? John Knight from Desiring God ministries cautions, "'Healthy' exists on a spectrum of possibilities just like disability. And that spectrum is becoming narrower with every passing year." He points to an article about University of Washington scientists who were able to identify the DNA sequence of a fetus with 98 percent accuracy, and with safer techniques.

The article noted, "The accomplishment heralds an era in which parents might find it easier to know the complete DNA blueprint of a child months before it is born. That would allow thousands of genetic diseases to be detected prenatally." That means that more children with disabilities will be aborted.

But Knight also argues that many people will be tempted to order up "designer babies"—all fueled by "an increasingly idolatrous mindset that says I have the right and the responsibility to determine what is best for me — including the physical and/or developmental makeup of my children, or somebody else's children."

Cicero said, “The thing itself cannot be praised. Only its potential.” He was talking about young children. Such was the view in the Empire where Jesus arrived as an infant. Plutarch said, “The child, is more like a plant” than a human, or even than an animal.

But Jesus and his followers had a different view of the moral status of children. To follow him, Jesus said, you had to become like a child. Even babies, Christians said, are fully human and fully bear the image of God. As the African bishop Cyprian wrote, “God himself does not make such distinction of person or of age, since he offers himself as a Father to all.” And if that’s God’s view, then “Every sex and age should be held in honor among you.”

The church even extended that honor and protection to the unborn. The Didache, one of the earliest Christian documents says, “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born.”

Throughout the Roe regime, contemporary Christians have similarly demonstrated their “contempt of death,” their pursuit of justice for the unborn, and their love of children and pregnant women. The church has more than mere potential to better bear witness to life. It is the house of the Life himself.

Betty Hodge knows what it’s like to have an unplanned pregnancy. And she knows what it’s like to have the father of the unborn child push for an abortion. She’s been there. But she didn’t seriously consider terminating her pregnancy, because she didn’t feel alone. Hodge said, “Thankfully I had a family that was supportive.” She now works at a pregnancy resource center in Jackson, Mississippi, so she can provide that same support for other mothers in need.

These days, she sees a lot of them. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (in 2022), allowing the state of Mississippi to pass a law banning all abortions except to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest that have been reported to police. The clinic that gave its name to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case shut down in July. It was the state’s only abortion provider. So, while women may still travel to Florida, New York, or Illinois to terminate a pregnancy, abortion has effectively ended in the Magnolia State.

The state health office estimates this will result in an additional 5,000 babies being born in Mississippi in 2023. The pro-life movement there is eager to celebrate each of these precious lives, but they’re also aware of other upsetting statistics: Mississippi has the highest rate of preterm births—over 30 percent more than the national average. The state has the highest infant mortality rate in the US, with nearly nine of every 1,000 babies dying. And for the infants who live to be toddlers, 28 percent will live in poverty.

Hodge doesn’t shy away from these hard facts. For her, this is part of the work of being pro-life. ... And with the state expecting 5,000 more babies in 2023, she sees an opportunity to put pro-life beliefs into practice and show that Christians care. She said, “If we’re going to say we stand for life, then it’s pertinent for us to stand up and say we don’t just care about the unborn child. As a church, we have an opportunity to make a difference.”

Can fetuses (or unborn children) really feel pain and experience a human connection with other humans? New scientific research provides a mass of evidence that they can. Here are some of the facts from the latest research:

• There is now strong evidence that fetuses as early as twelve weeks exhibit conscious, intentional behavior and that they actively discriminate among similar sensory experiences.

• At 12 weeks the baby demonstrates intentional “social” movements—behavior that isn’t accidental nor reflexive but demonstrates conscious awareness of the environment, and intentional—even social—planning of physical actions.

• As early as 14 weeks, fetuses distinguish between music and mere vibrational noise that stimulates the same auditory pathways.

• At 19–23 weeks unborn babies electively respond to and distinguish between different types of external stimulation, displaying more intentional movement to their mother’s belly touch than to maternal speaking.

• As early as 20 weeks, fetal hand movements toward the mouth and eyes are straighter and less jerky, revealing a surprisingly advanced level of motor planning.

Stuart Derbyshire, a researcher and former pro-choice consultant, was considered “a leading voice against the likelihood of fetal pain.” Yet, faced with mounting scientific evidence to the contrary, Derbyshire changed his mind and wrote, “The evidence, and a balanced reading of that evidence, points toward an immediate and unreflective pain experience mediated by the developing function of the nervous system from as early as 12 weeks.”

Newly-released figures (June, 2022) show that one-fifth of all US pregnancies were aborted in 2020, with 930,160 terminations taking place over the course of that year. The statistics showed that the number of terminations rocketed by eight percent between 2017 and 2020.

An exact breakdown on how advanced each of the terminated pregnancies has not been released. But researchers did determine that 54 percent of all terminations which took place in 2020 were the result of the so-called “abortion pill.” It sees women take two doses of a drug which induces miscarriage during the first 10 weeks of a pregnancy.

The statistics were released almost two months after a leaked Supreme Court draft judgement indicated plans to scrap the 1973 Roe v Wade law. It guarantees American women the right to an abortion. Multiple states are now poised to impose an outright ban on terminations as the conservative majority court prepares to publish its completed opinion.

The number of abortions carried out in 1973--the first year the procedure became legal--sat at around 750,000. That number rose to more than one million by the late 70s, and stayed there throughout the 1980s, reaching an all-time high of more than 1.5 million abortions in 1990.

The figure dropped below one million for the first time in 2011, and now faces decreasing further as tough new laws come into place across conservative states.

Advances in medical technology since Roe was published have further complicated the issue. Roe allows women to have abortions up until the point a fetus can survive outside the womb. That is currently defined as between 23 and 28 weeks of pregnancy.

But in 2021, an Alabama baby born at just 21 weeks went on to survive thanks to modern medicine that would not have been available in 1973, sparking further discussion about abortion time limits.

In what has been called “the greatest pro-life speech of all time,” the now-deceased Christian leader Richard John Neuhaus shared the turning point on abortion. He was a pastor of what he described as a “very poor, very black, inner-city parish in Brooklyn, New York.” Neuhaus had just read an article by a distinguished professor at Princeton named Ashley Montagu. Montagu listed the following qualifications for “a life worth living”—good health, a stable family, economic security, educational opportunity, the prospect of a satisfying career to realize the fullness of one’s potential.

Neuhaus wrote:

And I remember vividly looking out the next Sunday morning at [my congregation] and seeing all those older faces creased by hardship endured and injustice afflicted, and yet radiating hope undimmed and love unconquered. And I saw the younger faces of children deprived of most, if not all, of those qualifications on Prof. Montagu’s list. And it struck me then, like a bolt of lightning … that Prof. Montagu believed that the people of [our church]—people of faith and kindness and endurance and, by the grace of God, hope unvanquished—that, by (his) criteria, none of these my people had a life worth living. In that moment, I knew that a great evil was afoot. The culture of death is an idea before it is a deed. In that moment, I knew that I had been recruited to the cause of the culture of life.

In late 2021, a young man by the name of Kaivan Shroff published an article entitled, “Men like me benefit from safe abortion access.” By “men like me,” Shroff clearly means successful men, men who are too busy to care about any aspect of their sexual activity other than enjoyment, let alone take responsibility for it. Thanks to abortion, neither the needs and desires of the woman involved nor the life of the child who might come into being must enter his calculation.

According to his lengthy bio, Shroff is very important. He’s a senior adviser to D.C. non-profit and a former staffer for Hillary Clinton campaign’s digital team. Not to mention he has an MBA from Yale and a BA from Brown—and, he is about to graduate from law school. He certainly doesn’t need a child to complicate all of that success.

Shroff tells us, “In many ways, it feels like my life is just about to begin. It would be a terrible time to have a baby.” He wants to have kids someday. But he’s not in a relationship and after suffering through the pandemic, he’s ready “to eke out and enjoy every last minute of my 20s.” So, while he’s busy sowing his wild oats, any children he happens to father will just have to meet their untimely end, at least until the time is right for him.

Legal scholar Erika Bachiochi writes, “While pregnant, a woman is carrying a new and vulnerable human being within her. Unlike a biological father, a pregnant woman cannot just walk away; a pregnant woman must engage in a life-destroying act.”

Abortion, in other words, facilitates the sexual desires of cowardly, irresponsible men to abandon their unborn child and their child’s mother—while encouraging women to “free” themselves from the tyranny of their biology by committing an act of violence against their unborn child.

But what Shroff doesn’t acknowledge is that abortion isn’t cost-free. While it enables him to walk away from sex with nary a consequence, it requires much of women, much that doesn’t set them “free” at all.

Wayward teenage years and a surprise pregnancy had Christine Scheller fearing she had lost her salvation. She shares her story in an issue of CT magazine:

I had just been arrested for smoking hash in the drive-through of a bank while the driver was trying to cash a stolen check. I was getting high while committing bank fraud. That’s how out-of-my-mind stupid I was at age 16.

After being arrested Christine landed in a juvenile shelter. Free of the drugs that had clouded her thinking, she realized her life was going nowhere fast. After a month at the shelter, she went to stay with a family who offered transitional housing to wayward teenagers.

Pat and Carl were born-again Christians. Their Christianity didn’t seem focused on rules and right doctrine like some of the Baptists Christine knew and she began to consider the gospel.

One day I found myself kneeling in prayer on the opposite side of the coffee table from Pat while Jim Bakker preached on TV. Pat raised her hand toward me and began praying. I was thrown backwards into the couch by an invisible force. With tears streaming down my face, I raised myself up and surrendered my life to Jesus.

Christine was admitted to Eastern Mennonite University (EMU). It was there that she was introduced to the terrifying idea that she could lose her newfound salvation if she died with unconfessed sin or didn’t persevere in following Jesus. She said, “I was entirely unprepared for the challenge this Arminian doctrine posed to my softly Reformed faith. I grew seriously anxious about my eternal security.”

She prayed, “God, I don’t even know if I’m really a Christian. But I know that if I am, you didn’t save me to leave me in this pit.” She had broken off a brief relationship with her boyfriend when she found out she was pregnant. The first person she told outside her immediate family was Jeff. He was an old friend who had become a Christian in prison after one too many drug busts.

When my son was two months old, Jeff came to visit. Over the next few months, he started falling in love with my baby and me. The first time Jeff kissed me; I knew I would marry him. Never before had I felt so unconditionally loved and cherished by a man, or so challenged by another person’s radical faith.

I told Jeff I didn’t know if I was really a Christian. He explained the grace of God in such a way that I finally understood that I could not make myself good enough to earn forgiveness. “The Bible says Jesus paid the price for all your sin—past, present, and future. Nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” The words finally sank in. They were coming from a trustworthy friend whose background was similar to my own.

As Jesus taught, those who have been forgiven much, love much. I’ve been forgiven much—both before and after my conversion—and I never forget it.

Editor’s Note: Christine Scheller is an award-winning journalist and CT contributor. She and Jeff will celebrate 30 years of marriage this year.

Official estimates are that approximately 30,000 Canadians died from COVID over the last 18 months (Editor’s Note: article was written in 10/21.). To combat the illness, provincial governments locked down businesses for weeks going on months, and also kept people from church, from funerals, and from seeing their aged relatives or anyone else. Masks were mandated in most public settings, and vaccines went from being offered to being required to travel on trains or planes. And at the federal level, the government was spending almost $1 billion a day on Covid.

The point here isn’t to question these impositions and costs, but to contrast them with what’s being done for the unborn. We don’t even know how many unborn babies were murdered over the same 18-month period because that toll isn’t being printed in our daily newspaper. Their deaths aren’t thought important enough for figures to be kept current, so we have to go back to 2019 to get any statistics.

The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada reports 83,576 unborn children were killed that year though this number only includes hospital and clinic abortions, which means the overall toll could be much higher. So, over the same time period that we’ve been dealing with COVID, a conservative estimate would put the abortion death toll at well over 120,000 Canadians. We can be grateful that there are signs COVID may be abating, but the same isn’t true of abortion: long before COVID hit our shores, abortion was already ending the lives of one in five Canadian babies and it continues to do so.

Christians should pray for our governments to take action to protect the unborn, but the contrast presented here is one for God’s people to consider too. If the deaths of 30,000 concerned us enough to shut down the country, and got even the Liberal Prime Minister arguing that when there are other lives at risk then “My body, my choice” shouldn’t apply, how should we respond when we learn that another plague is killing four times that number? What sort of attention should we give, and what sort of time, energy, and money should we devote, to fighting abortion?

Roland Warren has led the National Fatherhood Initiative for 11 years. In 2012 he became president and CEO of Care Net, the nation’s largest network of pregnancy resource centers. Roland contends that one of the keys to stopping abortion involves getting men to step up as fathers. Roland says,

If I were to have a heart attack at this moment, the most important person is the first responder whose action affects the life trajectory of the person in a crisis. With pregnancy, the guy is typically the first responder. We did a national survey of women who had had abortions and asked them who they talked with about it. The No. 1 person—ahead of medical professionals, abortion providers, pregnancy centers, their mother, their best friend, their father, anybody—was the guy who got her pregnant. He’s the first responder and the most influential person in her decision to abort.

Roe v. Wade delinked fatherhood and motherhood. When we talk to clients, the mother often says, “I can’t give birth to this child.” She understands she’s already a mother: Her body is changing. Often when we talk to the men, they say, “I don’t want to be a father.” [But] he already is a father. The question on the table is “What kind of father will you be?”

Margaret Boemer went for a routine ultrasound 16 weeks into her pregnancy with her third child. She quickly found out that things were far from routine. "The doctor came in and told us that there was something seriously wrong with our baby and that she had a sacrococcygeal teratoma (tumor) . . . And it was very shocking and scary, because we didn't know what that long word meant or what diagnosis that would bring."

Although other doctors had advised her to terminate the pregnancy, her doctor told her about another possibility: fetal surgery. This option, though, would not be an easy road. Boemer said, “LynLee didn't have much of a chance. At 23 weeks, the tumor was shutting her heart down and causing her to go into cardiac failure, so it was a choice of allowing the tumor to take over her body or giving her a chance at life. It was an easy decision for us: We wanted to give her life.”

She was 23 weeks and 5 days pregnant, when the doctor performed the emergency fetal surgery. By this time, the tumor was nearly larger than her baby. Surgeons operated for about five hours removed the bulk of the tumor and then placed LynLee back inside the womb. Boemer was on bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy. Despite her pain, she marshaled her strength and made it another 12 weeks to nearly 36 weeks--full term--when LynLee Hope was born, for the second time via C-section.

Boemer said, "It was very difficult.” But seeing her toddler smiling with her sisters, she added: "It was worth every pain." A year after LynLee had been born for a second time, Boemer said, “We’re amazed at how well she is doing. We know that God has great plans for her in the future to do something big.” She explained how little LynLee loved to sing, one of her favorites, “Jesus Loves Me."

New York Times columnist David Brooks describes the rise of what he calls “Uber-moms”:

“Über-moms” are highly successful career women who have taken time off to make sure all their kids get into Harvard. And you can usually tell the Über-moms because they actually weigh less than their own children … During pregnancy, they’re taking so many soy-based nutritional formulas that the babies plop out—these gigantic, 14-pound toothless defensive lineman, just boom.

Über-moms cutting the umbilical cord, flashing little Mandarin flash cards at the things, getting ready for Harvard. They have their spiritual yearnings which they express mostly through food. So, they go through … progressive grocery stores that all the cashiers look like they are on loan from Amnesty International. And my favorite section is the snack food section because they couldn’t have pretzels and potato chips … that would not be spiritual. So, they have these seaweed-based snacks. We had bought veggie booty with kale, which is for kids who come home and say, “Mom, Mom I want a snack that will help prevent colorectal cancer.”

The famous 20th century British writer Malcolm Muggeridge once noted that in modern times, with family-planning clinics offering ways to correct "mistakes" that might disgrace a family name:

It is … extremely improbable … that Jesus would have been permitted to be born at all. Mary's pregnancy, in poor circumstances, and with the father unknown, would have been an obvious case for an abortion. Her talk of having conceived as a result of the intervention of the Holy Ghost would have pointed to the need for psychiatric treatment, and made the case for terminating her pregnancy even stronger. Thus our generation, needing a Savior more, perhaps, than any that has ever existed, would be too humane to allow one to be born.

Prince William and Kate Middleton gave birth to a baby boy named George, also known as His Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge. In an article for The Atlantic Owen Strachen notes that the unborn "royal baby" was never called the "royal fetus." Major media outlets usually prefer the not-quite-human state of being a fetus.

Strachen writes, "No, over and over again, one after another, from the top of the media food chain to the bottom, Kate's 'fetus' was called, simply and pre-committedly, a baby. Why was this? Because, as I see it, the royal baby was a baby before birth. The media was right; gloriously, happily right. Like all babies-in-womb, in the months before Kate gave birth, the royal heir was spinning around …. getting hungry, becoming sad and even agitated when voices were raised in marital conflict, sleeping, sucking its thumb, enjoying certain kinds of music, waking mom up in the night in order to do more spinning around/kicking, and eating hungrily what mom ate."

It's not often that a woman is paid to consider an abortion, but then, Crystal Kelley's pregnancy wasn't typical to begin with. A single mother wanting to help someone, and in need of cash, Kelley had found a couple with fertility difficulties who were looking for a surrogate mother to carry their child. Shortly afterwards, she was pregnant. All seemed well until testing revealed that the baby would be born with severe heart and brain abnormalities. The parents wanted to abort their child, but Crystal refused, even when offered $10,000 in cash. After driving to Michigan, where the child would be hers by law, Crystal delivered a baby girl who is now with an adoptive family willing to care for her health issues.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This story is a beautiful, though far from perfect, picture of choosing another's needs above your own, even when they can't give you anything. Though the baby Crystal carried was unable to offer her anything in return, Crystal protected and nurtured the child. Sounds a little like Jesus, who even when we were enemies chose to give us life.

An 1871 report from the American Medical Associated concerning abortion stated:

If our language has appeared to some strong and severe, or even intemperate, let the gentlemen pause for a moment and reflect on the importance and gravity of the subject. ... We had to deal with human life. In a matter of less importance we could entertain no compromise.

"I'm pregnant."

After Cori, my 21-year-old, unwed daughter, said those words, I went through all kinds of emotions.

Yes, it would be embarrassing. I wrote the book Sanctified Sex. I had criss-crossed the country telling thousands of young adults like my daughter to "just say no."

Yes, it broke my heart. I stayed awake many nights listening to my wife's muffled sobs. I came home many days to referee a family feud.

Cori has always made it clear that she likes the wilder side of life. She has always learned her lessons the hard way.

My wife, Roberta, and I have always wanted our home to be a place where no-strings-attached love could grow.

Throughout the crisis, I have asked God, "How do I model sensitivity and strength when my family is falling apart?"

God replied with several questions: "Will you quit, Haman? Will you quit loving your daughter? Will you quit investing in her life? Will you quit forgiving her as you have been forgiven?"

My answer continues to be: "No, I won't quit, Lord. With your help, my family will make it."