Sue Gilbert Sue is a consulting nutritionist. For many years she worked with Earth's Best Organic Baby Food, integrating nutrition and product development. She has written numerous articles on children's health and nutrition for parenting publications.
Caffeine is a drug that very quickly equalizes amongst all body fluid.
It is not filtered out by the placenta, and also, it finds its way into breast milk. The evidence of caffeine causing birth defects is very inconclusive. Despite the fact there were not enough sound studies to support advising pregnant moms to not ingest any caffeine, there was enough suggestion that it may cause a problem, and so I gave it up during pregnancy. The studies that did show birth defects showed a deformation of limbs. This happened to laboratory rats.