Smoking While Pregnant: The Dangers
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Everybody knows that smoking isn’t really worth both the long term and short term problems it causes and the amount of disadvantages multiply significantly when the smoker is a pregnant woman. In the UK alone, where only 17% of women smoke, 5000 miscarriages a year are thought to be caused from smoking during pregnancy. In fact, 70,000 pregnancies each year are affected by smoking, whether it means the baby is born with slightly less extreme issues such as respiratory problems and glue ear, or very serious issues like prematurity.
For the sake of the child’s life, it is necessary to smoke and be around cigarette smoke as little as possible during pregnancy.
And it’s not just a woman’s responsibility to stop smoking. It’s so much harder to quit smoking when you live in a house where somebody else smokes.
Interestingly, where you live can determine how likely you are to be smoking during pregnancy, with the North of England containing the areas with the most pregnant smokers. Unsurprisingly, these areas are also some of the poorest in the whole country. What’s more, pregnant teenagers are six times more likely to be smokers than pregnant women over the age of thirty.
Of course, any statement about the dangers of smoking while pregnant is going to trigger comments from people such as, “Well I smoked an average of one hundred and five cigarettes a day while I was pregnant and my children have turned out fine”. However, the facts and figures are there in black and white. Cigarettes don’t do anybody any good and especially not tiny and fragile babies.
The only real exception to the rule is women who smoke and didn’t realise they were pregnant. What’s important for them is to begin to drastically cut back as soon as they find out they’re pregnant and if possible, stop smoking completely. There’s an argument that the stress of trying to give up smoking is actually more detrimental than just smoking, however, most doctors dispute this.