Smoking and Pregnancy

Remember that smoking affects you AND your baby!

The following are just some of the horrible effects smoking in pregnancy can have on your baby:

• Lower birth weight. Smoking reduces the amount of blood that reaches your placenta starving your baby of the food it needs to grow.
• Smoking makes it harder to get pregnant in the first place by lowering your fertility.
• Once pregnant, smoking makes miscarriages more likely.
• After birth, babies born to smoking mothers cry more as they crave the nicotine you do in cigarette smoke.
• Babies born to smoking mothers are more likely to die unexplained (SIDS), and to suffer from asthma and ear infections when older.
• Children of smoking parents are more likely to smoke too.