The study included only English-speaking women from seven metropolitan public hospital antenatal clinics; therefore, women seeking care from private obstetricians, those from rural regions or those from culturally and linguistically different backgrounds may present with different patterns of drinking. However, the prevalence figures and predictors of PAE categories are specifically relevant to the target population which represents the majority of pregnant women in our State, where 70 % of women currently receive antenatal care in the public system. [45] Selection bias may have occurred if some women chose not to participate in the study because they did not drink alcohol while pregnant or because they were lifetime abstainers. Conversely, women drinking at higher levels may also have chosen not to participate or may have been more likely to drop out without completing all three pregnancy questionnaires needed to compute a PAE classification. All of this could affect our population prevalence estimates in Fig. 1. However, we achieved a sizeable number of women who abstained from alcohol (including lifetime abstainers), as well as a substantial number who drank throughout pregnancy, which we believe reflects realistic population drinking patterns.
