Many American Women Are Still Getting Totally Wasted While Pregnant

When you're pregnant, there are just a few rules about your diet that you will almost definitely be told to follow.

Avoid foods that commonly cause food poisoning, such as raw eggs, oysters, and sushi. Don't eat fish that's high in mercury. Steer clear of unpasteurized cheeses.

And rule number one: don't get wasted.

A single beer or nip of chardonnay once or twice a week probably won't cause any damage to a fetus, according to health officials. But because a relatively harmless half-glass of wine can quickly parlay into another, and another, most doctors recommend that women abstain entirely, and never drink to the feeling of drunkenness while there's a bun in the oven.

The only problem, according to the Centers for Disease Control, is that a lot of women aren't abiding by this well-known but self-regulated ordinance at all.

After analyzing self-reported data from more than 206,000 women collected between 2011 and 2013, a new CDC report released today reveals that there's a pretty troubling prevalence of binge-drinking happening even among women who are knowingly pregnant. Roughly 8,400 of the respondents—or 4 percent—were pregnant at the time they were surveyed.

About one out of ten pregnant women confessed that they had been drinking in the past 30 days, while 3 percent admitted to straight up binging on booze. Nearly 19 percent of pregnant women between the ages of 34 and 44 were drinking during their pregnancies. (Those numbers are compared to the 53 percent of nonpregnant women who had had a drink in the past month, and 18 percent that had a binge-drinking episode.)

More troubling, perhaps is that among all women who were binge-drinkers, those who were pregnant actually did so more frequently and with a greater amount of alcohol consumed per session than their fetus-less counterparts. In fact, the pregnant binge-drinkers were hitting the bottle hard an average of 4.6 times per month, versus 3.1 incidents for non-pregnant liquor-lovers.

Even scarier is the fact that because these responses were self-reported over the phone, there's a possibility that many of the women were actually toning down the frequency and severity of their drinking. Which might be no big deal if you're just a girl on the loose who loves her tequila shots, but if you're trying to grow a healthy baby in your booze-soaked body, that's another story. On top of that, some of the binge-drinking women surveyed may have been pregnant and not yet aware of it.

According to the CDC, current studies estimate that up to 2 to 5 percent of American first-graders exhibit traits pointing to fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, such as learning disabilities or physical and behavioral problems.

And if you want to chalk all of this up to lack of education, consider this: twice the proportion of pregnant women with college degrees were knowingly throwing back drinks, compared to pregnant women without a college education or less than a high school diploma. And—sorry, single ladies—unmarried pregnant women were 4.6 times more likely to be drinking with child than hitched women.

Therein lies one problem: alcoholism is pretty damn common in the US, and alcoholic women are able to conceive, too. But naturally, drinking through all three trimesters isn't the wisest way to cope.

But in case you're reading this with a baby bump and a margarita in hand, just be reminded: you're not the only one getting drunk in these circumstances. And your tolerance is a whole lot higher than that of your in-utero drinking buddy.