(MEDICALDAILY) — To drink or not to drink while pregnant? That has been the question for decades. Health experts have reverberated between siding with a no-tolerance alcohol policy and another more lenient approach to drinking while gestating. Finally, a leading group of U.S. pediatricians from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) have released a report that clearly warns mothers: No amount of alcohol is safe while pregnant.
"The only guarantee of having no effects from alcohol is no prenatal alcohol exposure," said the report’s co-author Dr. Janet Williams, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center, in a press release. Williams added that future research will continue to show, “alcohol has subtle yet important lasting effects on academic performance, attention, behavior, cognition, memory, language skills, and visual and motor development."