I stumbled onto a fascinating paper about "fetal alcohol syndrome" ("FAS") which raises some good questions about whether what we call "social science" deserves to be called "science" at all.

The essential criterion for any social problem is its universalization (Wagner, 1997Go). As long as a problem is orphaned, especially if it is identified as a problem only within a minority race or social class, it has limited impact on society as a whole. Liberal-minded social scientists are especially wary of associating a stigmatized behaviour with race or class, because such associations perpetuate discrimination (Wagner, 1997Go). By disassociating race or class from a stigmatized behaviour, the problem is more likely to gain public attention, because everyone now feels a vested interest in its elimination. The language of democratization therefore characterizes most social problems, e.g. child abuse, alcoholism, cocaine addiction, teenage pregnancy or domestic violence. Despite the fact that these are not 'equal opportunity' disorders (Abel, 1995Go; Wagner, 1997Go), they are typically scaled up into the middle and affluent classes to draw greater attention to the problem at hand and to overcome any charges of racism, classism, elitism, or any other accusation of discrimination (Wagner, 1997Go).

FAS has not been immune to democratization. When the disorder was first described in 1973, Jones and Smith and their co-workers took pains to emphasize its universalism by reporting that the eight unrelated children they had observed belonged to 'three different ethnic groups ...' (Jones and Smith, 1973Go). However, FAS has never been an 'equal opportunity birth defect' (Abel, 1995Go); its inseparable handmaidens are poverty and smoking (Bingol et al., 1987Go; Abel, 1995Go). What Jones and Smith and their colleagues did not emphasize was that the eight children, and virtually all the other children they and others subsequently examined, were seen in hospitals serving a predominantly lower socio-economic status population. Groups whose members suffer disproportionate poverty, such as Native Americans and African Americans, are especially prone to this disorder. In the Yukon and Northwestern areas of Canada, the rate for FAS and partial FAS has been estimated at 46/1000 for Native children compared to 0.4/1000 for non-Native children, a 1000-fold difference (Asante and Nelms-Matzke, 1985Go). In the USA, the rate of FAS among low income populations is 2.29/1000 compared to 0.26/1000, for middle- and high-income populations (Abel, 1995Go). Despite the empirical evidence, grass roots organizations, such as the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (NOFAS) continue to espouse the view that FAS is a threat to all pregnancies. When NOFAS was founded, for instance, its executive director stated: 'I think a lot of middle-class and upper-class women don't know that occasional use of alcohol during pregnancy is dangerous' (Information Access Company, 1991Go).

While it is true that drinking occurs across all social categories in the USA, FAS is undeniably concentrated among disadvantaged groups. The very large socio-economic differences in FAS rates (Able, 1995) are not due to differences in the number of alcoholic women among the poor compared to the middle classes. In fact, drinking is much more common among the middle and upper classes than among the poor (Abma and Mott, 1990Go; Caetano, 1994Go; Abel, 1998aGo). Instead, the reason FAS occurs predominantly among poverty stricken women is that they experience, or are characterized by, many more 'permissive' factors, such as smoking and poor diet, that exacerbate the effects of alcohol (Abel and Hannigan, 1995Go). Since FAS cannot be divorced from poverty, insisting that FAS 'crosses all lines' perpetuates the problem by situating it solely within an alcohol context instead of the wider context of poverty.

Democratization disguises the extent to which moral panic about FAS may in fact spring from much deeper social unease about changing gender roles and about class and particularly race differences (Armstrong, 1998aGo). Many legal commentators in the USA have noted that the recent rash of prosecutions of pregnant women for substance use and purported fetal harm are concentrated among poor and most often minority women (Roberts, 1991Go; Gomez, 1997Go). The moral panic over FAS likewise may reflect social divisions typically invisible in American society, particularly rifts over what constitutes a 'good mother'.

Because I've known many high-IQ individuals whose mothers drank like fish, I've always been suspicious of the claim that drinking during pregnancy decreases a child's potential IQ. Not that I'm advocating drinking during pregnancy, or even drinking. But sexing up statistics and creating false scares simply in order to call attention to a problem is not only dishonest, it can backfire. Fetal alcohol syndrome isn't even the point, really. The more this sort of thing goes on, the less people are likely to believe what they are told, and the less credibility "science" has.

Hmmm....

Might that be good?