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Beer and babies

This recent story in Smithsonian Magazine about attempts to sell "medical beer" during Prohibition reminded me of another another curious alcohol story during the Prohibition era. Circa 1929, Scientist Charles R. Stockard conducted a study measuring the effect of alcohol fumes on pregnant rats and concluded that alcohol increased "prenatal mortality." Prohibitionists, who tended to be eugenicists, had a field day with the study and used it to promote their agenda: Alcohol kills!  In response, their opponents (aka "Wets"), including Stockard, argued that the fumes of alcohol were a good thing, because they weeded out inferior individuals while they were still eggs.

...alcohol is highly beneficial as a selective agent tending to eliminate weak and defective individuals from the stock. It also may be noted that this elimination of defective individuals is performed in the gentlest manner by pushing the death moment back into the prenatal life-time, which in popular opinion is before the individual's existence has begun.

So, as fanatical as both groups of people were, they found a form of fanaticism they could agree on: eugenics. (I found this bit in a book by one T. Swann Harding called The Joy of Ignorance, 1932).