Drink-- and Have A Normal Delivery

Patricia Cunningham, wife of a New Jersey engineer, was joyously pregnant for the first time in eight years of marriage. Late last year, early in her sixth month, she began to have labor contractions. Since a baby delivered that prematurely would have no chance of survival, Obstetrician Arthur Perell took immediate steps to stop the contractions. But not by surgery to close the womb, a technique sometimes used. Instead, Dr. Perell got Mrs. Cunningham a bit tipsy, and kept her that way until the contractions stopped.

The use of alcohol to save premature babies was the discovery of Anna-Riitta Fuchs, a physiologist at Rockefeller University, who found that alcohol given intravenously to animals shuts off the production of oxytocin, the hormone that activates labor contractions. Mrs. Fuchs is the wife of Dr. Fritz Fuchs, obstetrician in chief at New York Hospital; during her fourth pregnancy, she began to have premature contractions, and thus became the first human to receive the treatment suggested by her animal research.

She got a pint of whisky, with soda, on two successive days, and eight weeks later had a normal healthy boy. Dr. Fuchs then refined the method, so that he now takes doubly sterile (spore-free as well as germfree) alcohol and makes a solution about as strong as a tall highball. Instead of giving patients a swig, he drips it into their veins. Among 100 patients so far treated this way at New York Hospital, and at least 200 more at White Medical Center in Los Angeles, the alcohol cut short the contractions in about 70% and delayed birth for as long as 15 weeks.

In the case of Mrs. Cunningham, the respite was as long as any recorded. After the first alcohol treatment worked, Dr. Perell sent her home from Overlook Hospital in Summit, N.J., with the prescription to "feel free to do a little elbow bending." Mrs. Cunningham felt like two bourbon-and-ginger-ale highballs a day. "This," she says, "was the only thing I could keep down." But it did not raise the alcohol level in her blood high enough to keep the oxytocin down. For that, a level close to the intoxication mark is needed. Her contractions began again. So back she went to the hospital. And there she stayed for eight weeks.

A fortnight ago, Patricia Cunningham gave birth to a full-term, 5-lb. 5-oz. girl. If she had had an infusion shortly before delivery, the baby might have been a bit high at birth. But she had had none; Beth Ann was sober and altogether normal.

Many obstetricians still have reservations about the alcohol-infusion technique, but Dr. Fuchs insists that he has seen no ill effects. And Dr. Perell can point to a record of five live babies for the ten patients treated in his individual practice. "Perhaps only one of these five would have made it alone without the treatment," he says.

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