Abstract
People exposed to alcohol in the womb can experience lifelong physical and developmental problems known as Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASDs). The resulting short- and long-term health outcomes of individuals with FASD-related problems, including FAS, create a significant fiscal burden on families, communities, and American taxpayers, who pay for medical treatment, long-term care, and loss of productivity resulting from healthcare institutionalization or criminal detention. It is possible to prevent prenatal exposure and FASDs, including FAS, by ensuring that pregnant women, as well as those who are trying to get pregnant or likely to get pregnant, abstain from alcohol, but many women continue to drink in spite of the serious health risks to their fetuses. Using publicly available data about pregnant women living in the United States between the ages of 18-44 from the 2010 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System annual health survey, I endeavored to determine which characteristics of American pregnant women best predict whether they report alcohol consumption. In examining this topic, I used binomial logit regression analysis to determine how several broad causal factors predict the dependent variable of whether or not pregnant women report alcohol consumption. Additionally, I compared the results of the analysis to the federal Center for Disease Control’s Project CHOICES intervention program, a program designed to reduce alcohol-exposed pregnancies by identifying women at high risk of drinking alcohol while pregnant, helping them reduce or cease alcohol consumption, and providing contraceptive counseling. I found that several demographic and personal characteristics help predict whether a woman reports alcohol consumption during pregnancy, including age, race, marital status, health insurance access, level of education completed, employment status, and state of residence. I found that the Project CHOICES program included several useful intervention techniques for reaching at-risk women, but that the program and others like it may need to adjust the criteria for identifying at-risk women in order to reach and treat more women. With the combined results of this regression analysis and case study, policy makers can adjust their current programs, or better target their outreach efforts, to help change the behavior of those groups of women who are at greatest risk for consuming alcohol during pregnancy. In this thesis, I recommend that policy makers who wish to reduce drinking among pregnant women should focus on targeting certain populations of women for public messaging and enrollment in public health programs, as well as addressing certain external factors that could lead to lower drinking rates among pregnant women.