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Syndicate
Since when is giving your unborn child FAS a human right?
Also, I wasn't talking about breaking the law and not serving people because of race, creed, etc. When someone makes a statement that could be construed as ambiguous, you always assume the most reasonable argument. It's good form to do so. You acted as if I suggested that people blatantly ignore the law, and act in a racist manner, which is not what a reasonable person would argue. I was talking about refusing service because you believe that serving them will cause harm to themselves or others. IMO it's no different than refusing to serve someone because they are too drunk.
It is about health... The health of her child.
As I've said, if she wants to go and drink, fine... but don't force people to assist her in doing so. Allow them to act on their conscience. After all, how would you feel if a woman was pregnant and drinking at a bar, and the alcohol you served her gave her child FAS. I know it would bother me.
No one is forced to serve anyone. That idea isn't even on the table. Yet.
Chauchat, you need to contact WHO, the Surgeon General, the Canadian Medical Association--hell, grab every doctor you can find and give them a good shake!--and tell them that you've discovered that a single drink can give a fetus fetal alcohol syndrome.
In all seriousness, I hope you realize you are being very offensive. What is you experience such that you can tell a pregnant woman her business?
OK, then...if it's about "the health of her child", then would you ALSO support legislation forbidding employers to fire pregnant women if those women were providing for the child by themselves(due to lack of a spouse for whatever reason or due to the spouse being put out of work)and would you favor making it illegal for landlords to evict pregnant women, especially in the dead of winter? You do realize that poverty and homelessness are just as bad for the health of a child as drinking while pregnant, right?
Yet? So it is a long term goal then? I must disagree with that. Legislation compelling someone to serve alcohol to a pregnant woman is as bad as legislation banning them from doing so.
I never said that a single drink can give a fetus fetal alcohol syndrome. Do not act as if I ever made such a claim.
Also, note that in 2 of my previous posts (#55 and #62) I said that a pregnant woman is within her rights to drink if she wishes. So how am I telling her what her business is? If my post offended you, I assure you that it was not intentional, but you really need to toughen up a bit in these regards. We're having a debate, there is no need to get offended by comments you disagree with as no offence is intended.
I'm against legislation in regards to either side of the issue. I'm just for allowing servers to follow their conscience in regards to serving pregnant women alcohol. Please don't try and make this more than what it is.
Unfortunately that is exactly the same argument that doctors and marriage commissioners are using when it comes to complying with certain other services which are perfectly legal.
I am fine with following conscience, so long as a resignation letter comes with it, and the job can be done by someone who is willing to comply with the law.
Chauchat, you're actually getting kinda funny.
Please, share more.
RP that was a great analogy. Thanks.
We can disagree on that one. Even when it needs to be changed or resisted, the law is one of the most important things there is, and we ignore it at our peril.
But that's another issue. I think we agree on this one.
Actually, Rebecca, that is quite inaccurate. Maysie referred above to the Canadian Human Rights Act, and its provincial equivalents are all very similar on the issue of gender discrimination. Here's what the law says, at Section 5:
Discrimination against pregnant women has long been held by tribunals to fall under discrimination on the basis of sex - going right back to the days when airlines used to fire flight attendants who became pregnant.
Short form: It's against the law for an establishment to refuse to serve alcohol to a woman because she's pregnant. They'd have to find, or concoct, some other excuse.
By way of contrast: Human rights codes also prohibit discrimination on the basis of age. But there are laws everywhere providing that you can't serve alcohol to persons under 18. Unless and until those laws were invalidated, bartenders have not only an excuse, but an obligation, to refuse to serve minors.
Another contrast: A bartender can lawfully refuse to serve an acquaintance whom they really dislike based on some personal interactions (e.g. a neighbour whose dog keeps soiling the bartender's lawn). As long as it can't be traced to one of the prohibited grounds (race, language, religion, sexual orientation, etc.), the bartender might get in trouble with her boss - but not with the law.
I agree with your post in general but quibble with this particular bit because it just isn't accurate. Drinking while pregnant causes lifelong harm, including impaired growth, and brain damage. Being poor doesn't cause harm on this level.
And I'll quibble with this: "Drinking while pregnant causes lifelong harm, including impaired growth, and brain damage." Always? How much? When?
Malnutrition as a result of poverty can cause harm on that level.
As can the exposure to the elements resulting from homelessness. If a pregnant woman is sleeping rough, that has a great potential to affect the health(including the neurological development)of the child she's carrying-to say nothing of the risk of violent attack on the streets(from criminals or, on a bad day, from the police themselves).
Ripple covered the first part, so I'll cover the second.
Poverty and other social determinants of health absolutely and often permanently affect health. This is documented and no longer speculation.
The point is not to blame individuals for being poor, but to make accountable the societal forces that have enabled poverty, homelessness, etc to run rampant without systemic solutions. And to reduce poverty. And to look at improving all 14 social determinants of health for communities that are negatively affected by the social determinants.
Sorry, we're way off topic now.
Here's the information I was trying to post yesterday:
Estimating the Prevalence of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: A Summary
I can't post the table but see Table 2 for the main risk factors.
This site summarizes the research on moderate drinking during pregnancy and why it has created such confusion (see under "Confusion"), but concludes that
The author, a sociologist, seems to express a fairly liberal, anti-prohibition stance. However the review of the research is useful.
http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/FetalAlcoholSyndrome.html
Some excerpts:
This is as I would suspect. If a mother-to-be is abstaining out of fear of consequences rather than out of a naturally occurring aversion to alcohol, then she may be denying something that is beneficial to her physiologically, and thereby denying her fetus those benefits.
There would ultimately have to be a legal basis to support the denial of alcohol service to a pregnant woman in a public establishment, regardless of personal opinion or conscience or whatever on the part of a bartender. In the event of a court challenge from someone carrying a foetus who was denied a drink on that account alone, and in order to find in favour of the drinking establishment, the legal opinion would have to designate the foetus as a person in need of protection, removing the right to control over the applicant's body from the applicant herself, and placing it under the supervision of the state, or in this instance, bartenders and servers...and any churches/evangelical interveners licking their chops over such a decision. These matters have already been settled in this country...but perhaps not for the most part it would seem.
Well, I imagine as a woman, you wouldn't be able to conceive... cisessentialism aside, I'd also be remiss if I didn't point out that based on the 10-4-3 metric (For every ten dollars a single adult needs to live alone, an additional adult needs four dollars and an additional child needs three, a good rule of thumb for determinine household utility) single parent, single child households on social assistance have much higher benefits in absolute and utilitarian terms than do dual parent dual child households... that all of these benefits are a pittance in comparison to even the Fraser institute's stated absolute poverty line (about 900 a month by their metric) doesn't say much, other than it's bad all around, but yes, there's also an inherently sexist belief that men should be breadwinners and thus are less deserving of government support. Policies that claim to be gender-blind often exascerbate institutional sexism.
And the boardrooms, I hate to break it to you, are not the sole repositories of power. When we mourn an equal amount of women during workplace fatality days of rememberance, when cis women are jailed in the same proportion (I don't want to launch into a discussion about Andrea Jones et al right now), when we recognize and deplore the rape of people regardless of gender, then that bit of rhetorical self-immolation will ring true. Until then, I'll maintain that everyone's got their own basket of gendered oppression, and for those of you who don't want to talk about the death gap or the invisibility of male victims of rape, I wonder if your goal is to separate sex from destiny, or to perpetuate misandry. (which I will admit to indulging in, but only for recrational purposes)
No woman or man or person otherwise identified ought to be told what to do with their gestation. Sometimes I'm reminded of the old saw, "if men could get pregnant..." (Many of them can, and many women, myself included, cannot) and I tend to think that Henry Morgentaler would've still gone to jail for the rights of those men to terminate their pregnancies... and Michelle Landsberg would've called it the desire of men to murder women, even in the womb. Of course, I'm just basing that on what most of the 2nd wave, at least those who got paid to be activists, said about trans women.
RP, men, including you, have a responsibility to be active, and you have a responsibility to be active on your own terms. We women don't know what it's like to internalize message of objectification as breadwinner, bodyguard, emotional rock. Or to have your sexuality treated as something you can't control, and something hideous and inherently transactional. If you really want to help women, stop putting up so much of a brave face. Admit that there's something patronizing about women being less likely to be sentenced to jail time when convicted, or being put in the 'safe' or 'less strenuous' jobs, or that there's something destructive about a society where one gender holds a three-to-two advantage over the other in liklihood of getting the post-secondary education that is now mandatory should one want to be in the middle-class.
The less willing you are to be graded on your ability to be a meat shield the less likely I am to be graded on my ability to be a piece of meat.
Therein endeth the rant. (And yes, before I get someone implying otherwise, I'm very much a feminist. I just don't subscribe to a unidirectional construction of gender-power, and there are lots of women who feel the same way and identify as feminists... if I can manage to be a left-wing-tory, I can manage that too.)
I'm.... speechless.
Yes, the darn feminists and their secret, man-as-meat-shield agendas...
This is hilarious.
Thanks for the guffaws, RTTG.
A little clarity is required.
That's a fair point, Sineed, and it does seem that FASD is over-represented in First Nations communities. I wonder if that has more to do with aboriginal people's lower physiological tolerance to alcohol or to the disproportionate incidence of alcoholism in First Nations communities. I would guess both.
What's not to understand? ;)
I think it boils down to this: Do you find that the women in your life often hold you in front of them when bullets or sharp projectiles are flying? And do you like this, or do you resent it?
"Fairly liberal, anti-prohibition" definitely describes the rest of this site, all the work of one Prof. David Hanson, which seems dedicated to proving that alcohol is good for you. Some tidbits:
Enough said, I think.
Well, like I said, it's helpful for the summary of the research that's so far been done.