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Smoking While Pregnant – The Effects Can Be Scary!

It is common knowledge that smoking while pregnant is not good for a baby inside the womb but few people know exactly why it is harmful to a baby. This article explains how smoking tobacco whilst pregnant, can harm an unborn baby.

Many of you may not be aware that one cigarette consists of more than four thousand harmful chemicals. Each time you smoke a cigarette, you are inhaling these chemicals into your body. If you’re smoking while pregnant , these chemicals will travel through the placenta and reach the baby. These chemical compounds can cause all kinds of harm to your baby because most of these chemicals are highly toxic.

The main issue with smoking while pregnant is that blood vessels are damaged when a pregnant woman smokes, and this harms the baby’s blood vessels as well as the placenta. If you continue smoking while pregnant, this will quickly cause damage to the placenta, resulting in the baby not get sufficient oxygen and nutrition. It is because of this reason that you will find that babies of women smokers are usually premature and they are also more stressed and smaller in size.

If a woman is smoking heavily while pregnant, this could separate the placenta from the wall of the uterus with fatal consequences to the unborn baby. What’s more, the woman will also be at high risk when this happens. It has been found that about one-tenth of the perinatal infant deaths are caused by cigarette smoking. One other important issue of smoking while pregnant is that the baby growing inside the womb may become addicted to nicotine.

As you may already know, the baby’s brain develops in the third trimester and according to research, babies of mothers who smoke during the later stages of their pregnancy usually have ongoing disabilities such as ADD or attention deficit disorder. The babies may also suffer from other learning disorders. While the research is not conclusive about the direct link between heavy smoking and these disabilities, it is advisable to stop smoking while pregnant because smoking could cause irreparable harm the brain of your baby. So to be on the safe side, you should refrain from smoking when you are pregnant.

Although there are some women who have a healthy pregnancy even though they were smoking while pregnant, it has been found that these women may face problems during the first few weeks of the baby’s life because the baby is already addicted to nicotine when he or she is born and when he or she is removed from the environment that has nicotine, the newborn will get irritable and grumpy.

The last thing you need is to have a baby that is already addicted to nicotine. Babies of women who smoke are at very high risk and if you want to give birth to a healthy baby then you should stop smoking while pregnant.