Drinking during pregnancy is typically frowned on, sure, but are we at least allowed to drink while trying for a baby? I’m not quite ready to give up my post-work glass of wine just yet. Will having even a little bit of alcohol hurt my chances of getting pregnant?
—Sage
To begin: heavy or binge drinking is associated with a number of negative health outcomes, going beyond fertility. For many health reasons, it should be avoided. Binge drinking during the “two-week wait” can lower the chance of conception.
When we turn to the question more often on people’s minds — namely, about light or moderate drinking — the data is more reassuring. This is a bit of a challenging question to answer with data, because many studies show correlation and not causation. Drinking behavior varies with demographics, and it also may vary with other pregnancy behaviors. If women who are more eager to get pregnant both cut down on alcohol (since it’s a common recommendation) and think more about the timing of sex, you’ll get a correlation (since sex timing matters), but it will not be causal.
A 2019 paper took on the challenge of causal estimates. In this paper, the authors used data (from Denmark) on women undergoing either IVF or IUI and connected their drinking behavior to the success of the procedures. Because all of these women were clearly trying to get pregnant, this is a way to avoid some of the obvious issues with simple correlations. What the authors found is that, for the range of drinking in their data (up to one drink a day), there was no relationship between alcohol consumption and the chance of conception.
So no, you don’t have to give up your post-work glass of wine.
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