Counseling on the dangers of consuming alcohol in pregnancy is now embedded in clinical practice. However, it took foundational research such as the 1974/75 Seattle Longitudinal Prospective Study on Alcohol and Pregnancy, analyzed in this book, to demonstrate the negative effects. This Seattle study interviewed 1,529 women in their fifth month of pregnancy regarding their alcohol consumption and many other pregnancy risk factors. A subsample of 500 of these women was selected, of whom half represented an oversampling of heavier drinkers and smokers from the 1,529, and their offspring were studied intensively as neonates and at ages 8 and 18 months and 4 and 7 years. This monograph is a summary of the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure upon a total of 474 outcome measures spanning those ages. The authors show that the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure manifest at all ages, from birth to seven years, that they appear on a variety of behavioral measures, and that they do not attenuate with time. They also show that binge drinking has more serious consequences than the same amount of heavy drinking, and drinking in early pregnancy has more serious consequences than the same reported pattern of drinking in mid-pregnancy. The book concludes that there is no statistical evidence for a “risk-free” or threshold level of prenatal drinking.

At the time of writing this book, Anne P. Streissguth was director of the Fetal Alcohol and Drug Unit at the University of Washington Medical School; Fred L. Bookstein was Distinguishged Research Scientist at the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan; Fred D. Sampson was Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Washington; and Helen M. Barr was a research scientist in the Fetal Alcohol and Drug Unit at the University of Washington Medical School.