ABSTRACT
"Patients with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)/Fetal Alcohol Effect are often raised in alcoholic families who are unable to protect their children from neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, sexual promiscuity, violence, maternal death, and abandonment," writes Ann Streissguth in her manual on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome among Native Americans. the growing alarm over FAS—an alarm whose context includes the devastating alcoholic impairment of Native Americans—has meant that Native American women are often singled out for scrutiny and condemnation. The chapter traces the strain of antidisease logic, which enables a healing discourse to become an antiwoman discourse, which at the very least focuses blame and which might well increase the sufferings of alcoholically impaired women and men. Women are the objects of suspicion and speculation in the discourse of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. James Milam, M. D., explicates the grounds and consequences of the identification of alcoholism as a disease.
