The emergence of the foetus: discourses on foetal alcohol syndrome prevention and compulsory treatment in Finland

Abstract

The scientific discovery of foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) in the early 1970s made pregnant women's heavy alcohol consumption problematic. A growing concern over prenatal alcohol intake has made FAS a major public health issue in the developed western countries and led to the proliferation of practices that aim to prevent it. This article provides a Nordic perspective on the existing and largely North American literature on the politics of FAS prevention. This article analyses how the proposal to use the compulsory treatment of pregnant women as an FAS prevention tool emerged and became a disputed political issue in Finland. The analysis is qualitative and the data consists of medical journals and political documents between the end of the 1970s and the 1990s. This article depicts how the foetus was constructed as a subject needing protection and how the prominence of the foetus served as justification for the demands for compulsory measures. This article argues that the strong professional status of the medical advocates of compulsory measures and the position of the foetus as an ‘ideal victim’ gave weight to demands for compulsory treatment. However, it is suggested that the public health approach that characterised Finnish alcohol and welfare policy made the compulsory care of pregnant women a controversial issue. This article concludes that during the study period, the Finnish FAS prevention discourse became increasingly individualised and focused on the foetus.

Keywords:

• foetal alcohol syndrome
• pregnancy
• alcohol
• the compulsory treatment
• Finland

Acknowledgements

The study has been funded by the Finnish Foundation of Alcohol Studies, the Kone Foundation and The Academy of Finland. The author thanks the anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Notes

Notes

1. This article focuses on prenatal alcohol use because the data does not address prenatal drug use. Drug problems were fairly marginal in Finnish society until the late 1990s. Prenatal drug use was acknowledged as a problem by experts in the late 1990s (Leppo 2008).

2. Since 2003, the umbrella term ‘foetal alcohol spectrum disorder’ (FASD) has been used to describe a continuum of permanent birth defects caused by prenatal alcohol (Sokol et al. 2003). The most serious form of FASD is FAS. Here I use the term FAS because the article analyses the 1980s and 1990s when the term FASD did not yet exist.