Cheers to the CDC’s misogynistic attitude toward women and drinking

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released a report underlining the number of fetuses born with fetal alcohol syndrome and came up with an answer to this problem. The CDC insists women refrain from drinking altogether unless on the pill.

Give its ridiculous report a good read. It’s a boozy doozy.

Either the CDC doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about or it’s specifically targeting women with a patronizing lecture about the dangers of alcohol. Honestly, it’s probably both.

Don’t you love it when the CDC visually organizes their archaic attitudes for us?

The report states in its opening: “An estimated 3.3 million women between the ages of 15 and 44 years are at risk of exposing their developing baby to alcohol because they are drinking, sexually active and not using birth control to prevent pregnancy.”

This right off the bat is enough to make their article lose its credibility. Not only does this imply that women are incompetent, it’s a blatant attack on our sexuality — particularly us girls in college. But the biggest problem here is that the CDC is making all the wrong assumptions. Based on the information they provided, they’re making their points under faulty premises:

1. All women are sexually promiscuous
2. Every woman’s primary agenda in life is to make babies
3. Women don’t understand the health risks involving alcohol consumption
4. Women are incapable of drawing the line in controlling drinking habits

The CDC is right about two things. Fetal alcohol syndrome is a tragic occurrence. There is a way to bring about awareness to pregnant women about this problem. Nobody is disagreeing with the underlying issues here. I get what the CDC is trying to accomplish here, but there’s a much better way to approach this without sounding patronizing.

Then there’s the whole “drinking too much can have many risks for women” section of the report.

It feels like such a no-brainer to say these “risks” they bring up aren’t limited to women. These can be just as detrimental to men but the CDC neglects to address that. The CDC also fails to mention that taking the pill isn’t the only way to prevent unwanted pregnancies. There are other options such as morning after pills, birth control shots, intra-uterine devices and — oh, I don’t know — condoms, which are available in basically every pharmacy under the sun.

It’s a bit unreasonable to tell women in 2016 the sole solution to this is to not drink at all. Drinking is bound to happen anyway. Alcohol has become so embedded into our culture, especially for us millennials here at Purdue. We’ve got our own traditions to uphold. Here’s looking at you, The Breakfast Club, Grand Prix week and Thirsty Thursdays at Cactus. But just because we drink alcohol doesn’t mean we won’t take the most basic precautions.

CDC, thanks for your genuine concern for women and our inability to understand whether we’ve taken one too many tequila shots. But I can assure you if I ever want to have a child — which would be way down the road — I’ll make the conscious decision of watching what I consume for my unborn baby’s wellbeing. I feel confident I would know to abstain from drinking alcohol altogether during my pregnancy. Most of us know better.

But right now I’m a busy college student who needs some good hard liquor by the end of the week to relax and unwind. So CDC, I can only promise you this: I will drink whenever I damn well please with my awesome friends, but responsibly and with some moderation. Bottoms up and boiler up!