Medicine: Sad News for the Happy Hour

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A city's bars caution mothers-to-be about drinking

Manhattan's Le Zinc restaurant, with its high ceiling and zinc-topped bar, is a popular spot for New Yorkers to relax with dinner and a drink after work. But last week the atmosphere be came less convivial for those pregnant women accustomed to their evening cocktail. On a mirrored wall behind the bar, amid an array of posted regulations, a new sign in stark black lettering went up. It read: "Warning: Drinking Alcoholic Beverages During Pregnancy Can Cause Birth Defects."

The sign was posted in accordance with a newly passed New York City health regulation requiring such notices in all bars, restaurants and liquor stores in the city. The regulation is the nation's first, but already the state legislatures in New York and Maine are considering similar laws. A proposal to put warning labels on alcoholic beverages has been introduced in Congress a number of times over the past five years, but without success. The most influential statement on the subject to date: a 1981 warning by the U.S. Surgeon General that pregnant women should avoid alcohol entirely.

Many U.S. doctors believe that the evidence against alcohol is strong enough to warrant strict warnings. But others disagree and doubt that warning signs are justified. Basically, physicians are disputing the degree of alcohol consumption necessary to risk the abnormalities that physicians call FAS, for fetal alcohol syndrome. Says Dr. Robert J. Sokol, an obstetrician at Wayne State University: "It's questionable whether there has ever been a case of an FAS child born to less than a chronically addicted woman." Dr. John Larsen of George Washington University even takes issue with the Surgeon General's findings. There is no evidence, he says, that "one glass of wine has any damaging effect." His concern is that the posting of signs will serve only "to burden with guilt the well educated and sensitive, without having any effect on pregnant women who are heavy drinkers." Indeed, says Boston University Psychiatrist Henry Rosett, such warnings might create anxiety that could threaten the health of a pregnant woman and her child.