Smoking Cessation in Pregnancy

Smoking has substantial adverse effects on an unborn child, including growth retardation, pre-term birth, miscarriage and perinatal mortality.  Smoking is linked to “cot death” or sudden infant death syndrome, the commonest cause of death between the ages of 1 month and 1 year.

Ideally, women should stop smoking before getting pregnant. In reality, most women who are planning to start a family don’t stop smoking before they become pregnant, and it is pregnancy, itself, that is often the trigger for quitting. The greatest benefit for mother and baby results from cessation before, or as early as possible in pregnancy.

About 20-30% of smoking women quit when they become pregnant but about 70% of these relapse either during pregnancy or after their baby is born.  One significant contributor to the relatively low success rates is the low rate of clinicians offering of effective smoking cessation strategies.  Smoking cessation interventions are especially effective during pregnancy because mothers are usually aware of the benefit to them and their baby of quitting smoking. Post-partum follow up reduces relapse rates.

Smoking cessation programs are effective during pregnancy.  As the dose of nicotine from NRT products is smaller than from smoking, the risk to the fetus is assumed to be lower than if a woman continues to smoke. However, there is, currently, a lack of evidence on the safety of pharmacotherapy in pregnancy, and so the benefits of using nicotine replacement therapy should be carefully balanced against the potential risks and discussed with the mother.

Side Effects Of Smoking On Pregnant Women

Respiratory and Reproductive Problems

When a pregnant mother smokes the amount of oxygen that she inhales gets reduced. Similarly, the carbon dioxide will not be fully exhaled from the body. The oxygen will be insufficient to meet a mother’s own needs. A small quantity of oxygen is passed from the mother to the baby. The baby also gets more amount of carbon mono oxide because the entire quantity is not exhaled from her body. Ultimately both the mother and the child will be breathing poisonous gases like carbon dioxide and will breath less oxygen and suffer from all sorts of respiratory problems.

Pregnant women smoking is risky as well as it damages their reproductive system. Similarly, their child’s reproductive system will also be damaged more intensely. This could as well affect the sex life when the child grows into a big person. The semen count could be reduced in chances of a male. It could even make him impotent. In case of female the ovary and fallopian tubes are intensely damaged. This makes it difficult and at times even impossible to conceive babie

Risks of Passive Smoking

A baby is also affected by passive smoking. If the husband or partner of the pregnant woman smokes the baby and the mother gets equally affected. Similarly if other persons who visit a pregnant woman smoke the baby can get affected. It is therefore advisable to ask the partners and others to refrain from smoking when they are with the pregnant woman.Similarly a new born baby’s health is also affected if her father or people around her smoke. Since the baby’s physical system will be very timid the smoke can cause lot of infections. The health of the mother is also affected in the process as they would have already lost a lot of stamina during the birth. So the smoke can cause more harm to them. Any harm caused to the mother will automatically be passed to the baby because as the baby spends most of the time with her mother until she or he is fully grown and consumes her milk through breast feeding in the early stages.

Hereditary Problems

Pregnant woman smoking is considered to be dangerous because she also passes the hereditary diseases to her offspring. No doubt genetic characters right will automatically be inherited at the time the cell formation takes place. When a pregnant woman smokes the repercussions are only greater and the child gets vulnerable to all the hereditary diseases .The risks are comparatively smaller for a woman who does not smoke.

These are some of the effects of smoking on pregnant women and their health hazards for a woman smoking in pregnancy are endless. You should not underestimate or think, “What can smoking do to a pregnant woman”? The earlier a pregnant woman quits smoking the healthier will be her child. Her act is more dangerous when compared to any other woman smoking because it involves two lives.

If a pregnant woman who quits smoking has, nicotine withdrawal symptoms then the same could happen in the case of a newborn child. There is nothing much to panic about this because the baby would have got acquainted to smoke and nicotine addiction while it was in the mother’s womb and so the withdrawal symptoms are only natural.