Are South African women drinking to disable their unborn children?

9 January 2013

According to some news aricles this week, South African women are deliberately drinking heavily in order to disable their unborn children, in order to claim relatively generous disability benefits.

Words to this effect have been circulating across the internet, and on Sunday Sky News reported the story of one case in point.

The Mail Online reported the same story the following day:

"Horrifying story of pregnant South Africans who are deliberately binge drinking... so they get more welfare for the babies they harm."

The original Sky report certainly makes for shocking viewing, but how much of it is based on actual evidence?

As fellow factcheckers Africa Check have found, not a great deal.

Heavy drinking by pregnant women in South Africa is certainly widespread - some of this was evident from the Sky News report. The World Health Organisation, among others, point out that South Africa has among the highest prevalence of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs) in the world. 

Africa Check spoke to the South Africa-based Foundation for Alcohol Related Research (FARR) who confirmed this through their own research.

But the idea that women are deliberately drinking heavily in order to disable their unborn children so that they can claim disability allowance - worth around five times the amount of state benefits for families in poverty - is more difficult to pin down.

FARR's own research, based on interviews with mothers of FASD children, found:

"FARR colleagues have interviewed thousands of pregnant women and mothers of children with FASD to date and have not come across one single mother who reported that she 'drank on purpose to cause disability in her child so as to qualify for a disability grant'."

"In our experience every single woman, irrespective of her educational or socio-economic status always responds with 'if I had only known' when she is told that her child has FASD due to her alcohol use during pregnancy." 

Obviously interviews aren't necessarily a reliable way of finding out whether a mother has intentionally disabled her own child. However, while the Sky News report highlighted the single case of a mother deliberately damaging her unborn child, Africa Check found there simply isn't any evidence that this is happening on any wider scale.

This isn't to say the problem doesn't exist, as Sky News themselves alluded to in their own statement. But, for now at least, the size of the outrage is disproportionate to the evident scale of the problem.

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