Bad for your Baby's Health

There are many reasons not to smoke. To mention a few, higher increase in cancer, lung disease, blood disorders and heart disease. Now add, increase in premature birth and risk of miscarriage, in pregnant women. If you're pregnant and smoke cigarettes, you're smoking for two. When you inhale, you inhale nicotine, carbon monoxide and other chemicals. These pass into your baby's body. No baby should be forced to smoke.

 

Since a lot of smokers have healthy babies, how come we're writing this? How great is the risk?

 

1.)     Up to 14% of all premature births, are caused by a mother smoking.

 

2.)     Babies born to women, who smoke during pregnancy, are nearly half a pound lighter on average than babies born to non smokers.

 

3.)     Those low birth-rate babies are subject to many more problems than normal weight babies.

 

4.)     Smoking during pregnancy increases the risk of miscarriage and the risk of infant death. The more you smoke, the greater the risk.

 

I'll bet you didn't know this. The unborn baby doesn't breathe in the womb, as rapidly as we do in the air world, but he/she does begin to breathe at 3 months and continues with slow rhythmic respiratory movement until birth. This is nature's way of getting the baby in shape to breathe more rapidly after birth. This early, in the womb breathing, develops the muscles for respiration.  The effects of cigarette smoking are so immediate and so powerful, that your baby's practiced breathing movements, slow down after you smoke just 2 cigarettes. The more cigarettes you smoke, the more you interfere for your baby's preparation for life outside the womb. 

 

Why are these babies smaller? Carbon Monoxide is inhaled and gets into your baby's bloodstream. It forces oxygen out of the red cells of both mother and baby.  Add to this a powerful poison, nicotine, which adds to the damage, by narrowing the blood vessels, including the placenta. Both of these side-effects, result in preventing enough oxygen and nutrition, from getting into little babies. That's why babies from smoking moms weigh less. They've been malnourished.

 

After birth, nursing mothers should know, that nicotine more easily finds it's way into your breast milk, because there is no more filtering, as with the umbilical cord in the womb.  Also, when you smoke, or people around you smoke, it gets into the baby's little lungs, causing your baby's tiny airways to get even smaller, and can even block them. Since babies, as you know, breathe faster than adults, they inhale more air, and with it more pollution in comparison to their total body weight. Thus, children whose parents smoke have a much higher incidence of pneumonia and bronchitis.

 

If you're interested in your baby's health, as well as your own, then please don't smoke.

 

Taken from "Life Issues Institute" 2010.