While occasional drinking is not a decision I take lightly, it is also a decision in which I am not (quite) alone. Lisa Felter McKenney, a teacher in Chicago whose first child is due in January, said she feels comfortable at her current level of three drinks a week, having been grudgingly cleared by her obstetrician. “Being able to look forward to a beer with my husband at the end of the day really helps me deal with the horrible parts of being pregnant,” she said. “It makes me feel like myself: not the alcohol, but the ritual. Usually I just take a few sips and that’s enough.”

Ana Sortun, a chef in Cambridge, Mass., who gave birth last year, said that she (and the nurse practitioner who delivered her baby) both drank wine during their pregnancies. “I didn’t do it every day, but I did it often,” she said. “Ultimately I trusted my own instincts, and my doctor’s, more than anything else. Plus, I really believe all that stuff about the European tradition.”

Many women who choose to drink have pointed to the habits of European women who legendarily drink wine, eat raw-milk cheese and quaff Guinness to improve breast milk production, as justification for their own choices in pregnancy.

Of course, those countries have their own taboos. “Just try to buy unpasteurized cheese in England, or to eat salad in France when you’re pregnant,” wrote a friend living in York, England. (Many French obstetricians warn patients that raw vegetables are risky.) However, she said, a drink a day is taken for granted. In those cultures, wine and beer are considered akin to food, part of daily life; in ours, they are treated more like drugs.

But more European countries are adopting the American stance of abstinence. Last month, France passed legislation mandating American-style warning labels on alcohol bottles, beginning in October 2007.

If pregnant Frenchwomen are giving up wine completely (although whether that will happen is debatable — the effects of warning labels are far from proven), where does that leave the rest of us?

Image What amount? Signs bear a warning that some women choose to ignore. Credit... Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

“I never thought it would happen,” said Jancis Robinson, a prominent wine critic in Britain, one of the few countries with government guidelines that still allow pregnant women any alcohol — one to two drinks per week. Ms. Robinson, who spent three days tasting wine for her Masters of Wine qualification in 1990 while pregnant with her second child, said that she studied the research then available and while she was inclined to be cautious, she didn’t see proof that total abstinence was the only safe course.