Thirty years ago, my mum drank while pregnant… I am still paying …
Source: Daily Mail ()
Thirty years ago, my mum drank while pregnant… I am still paying a terrible price
By TANITH CAREY - More by this author »
Last updated at 22:26pm on 4th December 2007
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Most mothers would have been only too pleased to care for a baby who never cried.
But every day for the first year of his life, Janet Verity anxiously waited to hear a whimper from the frail, sickly infant she had fostered.
Instead, baby Matthew was strangely silent, sedated by the alcohol which had coursed through his body week after week while he was still in the womb.
“He was very floppy and subdued,” says Janet. “He was 11 months old before he even cried.
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Robbed: Matthew aged 12 months with his birth mother Maureen
“The woman who gave birth to him had been a binge drinker. So by the time he was born, Matthew was so pickled in alcohol, he was drunk as well.
“It took him a year to properly detoxify his body. After that, every milestone in his childhood was late.
“He didn’t laugh until he was one. He was nearly three years old before he sat up, and four before he walked.”
Matthew was the first baby in Britain to be diagnosed with Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder in 1977 - a term which had then only recently been coined by doctors in America.
Now 30, Matthew is living proof of the irreversible damage alcohol can inflict on a baby in the womb.
At a time when binge drinking in Britain is spiralling out of control - especially among young women - and ever more conflicting advice emerges on drinking during pregnancy, his story reveals the heartbreaking reality of life for the child of an alcoholic mother.
Thanks in part to a devoted and privileged upbringing by Janet and her husband Richard, who went on to adopt him, Matthew has overcome many of his difficulties and grown up to become a well-spoken young man. Yet it impossible for him to live independently.
So affected are parts of his brain, including his short-term …