Birth Defects

Smoking During Pregnancy - Let Your Child Have the Choice

By Natural Pregnancy ⋅  Email ⋅  Print ⋅

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the Natural Pregnancy RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

By: Jared Mitchell

The word ‘Mother’ is synonymous with care, love and all good things on the earth. Mothers who smoke, however, can be inadvertently killing and maiming their children – born and unborn. Shocked? It’s true. Mothers who smoke are potentially gifting their children with lung cancer and many other similarly devastating diseases through second hand smoke. Women who smoke during pregnancy harm their unborn babies directly in the womb.

Here are more unsettling reasons to bear in mind when smoking during pregnancy or around your newborn child. It will not only interfere with your health, it will also interfere with the health of your child:

1. First of all, smoking makes it hard to conceive. Reports show that fertility in both men and women are heavily affected by smoking. In women, smoking interferes with the egg movement toward the fallopian tubes as well as the hormones that are produced during pregnancy; while in men, it lowers the semen count, and the motility of the sperm. In many cases smoking also affects the shape of the sperm making it incapable of penetrating the egg.

2. Children born of smoking parents potentially inherit a low fertility syndrome and suffer from a great number of infertility problems.

3. Smoking in many cases is the main cause for impotency in men as it interferes with the blood supply to the penis.

4. The baby in the womb of a pregnant smoking woman gets its nicotine addiction right from pre-birth as its blood imbibes the nicotine that the mother’s blood shares with it; hence it is more likely that when born they would become a smoker – and also contract all smoking related diseases.

5. In rare cases the placenta is directly affected by smoking causing a miscarriage of the fetus, or death in the womb.

6. Babies of smoking mothers will be most likely to be born premature and under weight.

7. Babies are also likely to have less developed vital organs than their counterparts (babies of non-smoking mothers) – there is a great likelihood that these babies have an undeveloped liver which will affect them throughout their lives.

8. The babies of pregnant smoking women have poor lung functions right from birth.

9. These babies are twice as prone to die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) than the babies of non-smoking women.

10. The babies of those women who smoked 15-20 cigarettes a day are more likely to be sickly.

Any one of the above causes should be sufficient enough to make you quit smoking – if not for yourself, for your little miracle that is being formed in your womb. Read the above lines again, and then once more – is that what you want to give to your most precious creation? Would you really be comfortable thinking that you are voluntarily and consistently harming your child even before childbirth? These are some questions that you should seriously consider.

Get in touch with your doctor today and enlist his/her help to quitting smoking. You owe it to your child to be healthy and give them a healthy beginning to the start of their life. As a mother, you are the nurturing contact of the child – do not become the poison in your own child’s life.

Jared Mitchell manages websites in the field of quitting smoking such as http://www.gumauctions.com. Using nicotine gum reduces the negative health consequences of cigarette smoke inhalation and cigarette by-products.

Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles

Sheryl’s comment:
Smoking and children simply do not mix. As this article suggests, smoking can keep you from becoming pregnant in the first place, can cause spontaneous miscarriage, can cause a number of potentially deadly childbirth complications such as placenta previa, can cause infant death from SIDS, and can lead to a myriad of health problems that will haunt your child for life.

Even if you conceive and everyone survives ok, do you really want a child that is never as healthy as other kids, has asthma, is never quite as smart and seems to get sick all the time? Do you want to wonder why your baby got some form of cancer in her thirties or was never able to conceive?

It is not OK to start smoking the second you are finished with childbirth either. Nicotine passes through breastmilk and will create an addiction in your little one. Forget about co-sleeping because you will release toxins in the air as you sleep increasing your child’s risk of SIDS even further. Think you can smoke outside and get away with it? Nope! Toxins will cling to your clothing and be released into the air around your baby when you come back in. You can try to rationalize, justify or find a way around it, but there is no way around it. If you smoke - you are harming your child. Period.

Even if you cannot quit totally due to stress or some other influence, then cut back. Start by doing prenatal yoga every single day. At least you will not be smoking while you are watching the video. Start meditating for 15 minutes a day and work up to 30 minutes. Both yoga and meditation will also reduce your stress levels and should allow you to cut back further. Start taking a brisk walk every day on your lunch or first thing in the morning. Make sure to leave your cigarettes at home while you workout. Take up swimming, tai chi or prenatal pilates. If you do all of these things, you will feel great, look fantastic and you will not have the time or the inclination to smoke (at least not as much).

Do it because you love yourself and your baby.

Buy the book: Smoking and Pregnancy
Buy the book: The Easy Way to Stop Smoking

Tags for this post