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Smoking While Pregnant
Facts About Smoking and Environmental Tobacco Smoke During Pregnancy
Numerous scientific studies indicate that smoking by pregnant women, or
their regular exposure to environmental tobacco smoke, also known as secondhand smoke, dramatically increases the risk of a range of health problems both to themselves and their babies, including the following:
- spontaneous abortions
- ectopic pregnancies
- other birth and delivery problems
- fetal brain damage
- growth retardation/low birth weight
- lower or higher than normal infant blood pressure
- problems requiring neonatal intensive care
- infant death from perinatal disorders
- sudden infant death syndrome
- mental retardation
- respiratory disorders during childhood
- Attention Deficit Disorder
- other learning and developmental problems
- behavioral problems, violence, and criminality
- smoking during adolescence
- various adult health problems
- cancer-causing agents in infants’ blood: potentially carcinogenic mutations; and childhood leukemia
Cost Effectiveness of Smoking Cessation during Pregnancy
- Smoking cessation for pregnant women results in savings of $2 to $3 for every dollar spent.
- The savings from preventing hospitalizations for illnesses and conditions related to low birth weight are more than $6 for every $1 spent on smoking cessation.
- Americans spend an estimated $1.4 billion on complicated births due to smoking.
- An annual decrease of only 1% in smoking prevalence in the U.S. would result in 1,300 fewer low weight births and would save $21 million in direct medical costs in the first year of a smoking cessation program.
What do I need to know about Smoking and Breastfeeding?
- Smoking can cause problems if the mother breastfeeds her baby. Nicotine is a drug that is passed to the baby in her breastmilk, and can cause nausea, colic, cramping and diarrhea in the baby.
- Smoking may reduce milk supply and interfere with the let-down
response
- Even formula-fed infants of mothers who smoke excrete nicotine and cotinine (a nicotine by-product) in their urine.
- For mothers who smoke, it is recommended that they abstain from smoking for two hours before nursing. This means quitting for mothers of newborns.
- Mothers who smoke should smoke outside, away from the baby.
- Absorption of nicotine by infants is greater from the respiratory tract than from breast milk.
- The benefits of breastfeeding may outweigh the risk of some nicotine exposure.
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