Alcohol’s Effects on Offspring
The “Journal of the American Medical Association” declares that in actual experiments with guinea-pigs, it has been clearly shown that alcohol affects the offspring through either parent. In nine matings of normal animals in the same group, there were nine living litters of seventeen vigorous individuals, but out of forty-two matings of alcoholized animals never completely intoxicated, but constantly in a chronic state of alcoholism, only seven survived, and five of these were runts. Some were born dead, others died in convulsions at an early age, and in general the deaths of the unhealthy young followed symptoms of nervous disorders. If such is the effect upon the human, and there is no reason to doubt otherwise, it accounts for many of the mentally and physically defective and incapacitated now in existence.