Health studies have shown that smoking can affect your heart as well as your lungs. Smoking also raises your risk of certain cancers. While you are pregnant, smoking also affects your unborn child. It reduces oxygen and blood flow to your baby. This may cause bleeding problems that can put your pregnancy at risk, or even cause miscarriage or stillbirth.
How Smoking Affects Your Baby
When you smoke during pregnancy, you put your baby's health at risk. Any or all of the problems below are more likely to occur.
- Your baby is more likely to be born too soon (premature birth). When this happens, the baby's lungs and other organs may not be fully formed.
- Your baby could have a low weight at birth. This does not make delivering the baby easier. In fact, a low-birth-weight baby is at greater risk during labor.
- Your baby could have breathing problems, such as asthma or allergies.
- Recent studies suggest that your baby might run a greater risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
- Smoking during pregnancy may be linked with childhood behavior problems and slower progress during the early years of school.
- If you smoke and breastfeed, chemicals in the cigarettes can be passed to the baby through your breast milk.
How Smoking Affects You
Smoking has been linked with many serious illnesses. It also increases signs of aging. Among other effects, smoking can:
- Increase your risk for lung cancer, bladder cancer, and cervical cancer.
- Raise blood pressure, which increases your risk of heart attack or stroke.
- Reduce blood flow, which can slow healing and cause wrinkles.
Facing Facts
While you're pregnant, you are breathing for both you and your baby. When you smoke, your breathing becomes shallow and your lungs fill with smoke. Then you and your baby get less air. Cigarettes also fill your body with chemicals, such as nicotine and tar. These get passed on to your baby.
- Carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke takes the place of oxygen in your blood. It passes to your baby through the bloodstream.
- Nicotine raises your blood pressure and heart rate. It reduces blood flow to your arms and legs, and slows digestion. Nicotine may also reduce blood flow to your baby and cause birth defects.
- Tar is what`s left after tobacco is smoked. This sticky brown material gums up your lungs, so less oxygen gets into your bloodstream. This affects you and your baby.
- Over 4,000 other chemicals in smoke include formaldehyde, arsenic, and lead. Dozens of these chemicals are known to cause cancer.
