How does my smoking affect the health of my unborn baby?
There's actually three things to consider about a woman's responsibility to her unborn child. The first is the cigarette smoke that you breathe in is damaging you. It's decreasing the amount of oxygen your lungs can deliver to your body, and the child can only get oxygen from you. The second thing is, that it is delivering nicotine to your body which is constricting blood vessels. Your baby is growing in an environment in your womb where it needs oxygen, and it needs blood from you. And if that womb has its blood supply constricted, and the blood that does get through is robbed of oxygen, that child cannot grow to the potential that it could otherwise. So the size, and the ability, and the health and the vitality of that growing foetus is compromised because of those two simple effects: the nicotine and the carbon monoxide. The third area is in the development of your child's brain. From a very small size, to the size of a child's brain when it's born, the last three months are the most critical period. If you have been smoking in your early pregnancy, I seriously advise you to talk to your doctor if you can't quit on your own, so you are absolutely off all tobacco and nicotine by your last third of your pregnancy, your last trimester, because that's when your child's brain is developing into a brain that is habituated and sensitized to nicotine. You're making a smoker inside your womb, that when they grow up and taste that first cigarette themselves, their brain already knows what to do with it. They've already been addicted. So from all three of those, protecting yourself, protecting the development of your child so that it gets adequate oxygen and blood supply, and protecting the development of that child's brain so it doesn't grow up inside your womb as an addict, are all three very important and convincing arguments for you to take the steps right now to get help. To do it on your own, this is tough. Get help and stop smoking as soon as you can.
