It is a fact that smoking while pregnant will have detrimental effects on the health of an unborn child, yet pregnant women still do so and worse, some admit to continuing the bad habit in the hope that they will give birth to a smaller child in the hope that it would make delivery easier. This was reported by researchers from Southampton University at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Sweden.
In fact, rather than make the delivery process easier on the mother, it was stressed that there are often more complications when delivering babies from smoking mothers. The effect that smoking has on these babies would likely lead to serious health problems later on in adult life that have long been associated with their low birth weight.
Researchers at Southampton University have produced, for the first time, solid proof that women who stopped smoking when they found they were pregnant had protected the health of their babies. 50,000 pregnancies, birth weights and smoking behaviour were observed. Women who had continued to smoke throughout their pregnancy gave birth to babies that were significantly lower in weight. When compared with the weight of babies born to non-smoking mothers, the difference is staggering.
Babies of an average of 11oz were born to those who smoked more than 10 cigarettes each day while pregnant and babies weighing on average 7lb and 10oz were born to non-smokers.
It is astonishing that some women were smoking deliberately to get a lower birth weight baby without taking into account the potential lifelong harm that this could do to their child. While it is pointless castigating ignorance, we clearly need some public information campaign targeted at pregnant women informing them that a lower birth weight is not a good thing!