Student blog post: TEENAGE GIRLS IN AUSTRALIA ARE TAKING UP SMOKING IN PREGNANCY TO DELIBERATELY HAVE SMALLER BABIES, STUDY FINDS  

Feed URL: https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/criticalthinking/2017/04/20/student-blog-post-teenage-girls-in-australia-are-taking-up-smoking-in-pregnancy-to-deliberately-have-smaller-babies-study-finds/feed/?withoutcomments=1

 

The news story behind this headline is that it was found in a study that teenage girls, as young as 16 are deliberately smoking in order to have smaller babies due to their fear that their small bodies will not be able to handle childbirth. They decided to do this due to seeing health warnings on cigarette packaging, stating that ‘smoking while pregnant can reduce the weight of your baby’, which is supposed to deter mothers from smoking during their pregnancy, when instead this warning convinced them to smoke, and even current smokers to smoke even more. The data was collected from a 10 year anthropological study into smoking in Australia called ‘The New Zealand Herald Reports’, which is a very accurate study. However even though the girls are more likely to have smaller babies, with studies showing that mums who smoke are ‘twice as likely as non-smokers to have low birth weight babies’, with these babies weighing 200g lighter on average. Therefore, although this is shown to be accurate, the girls are not aware of the health hazards smoking while pregnant has as which could lead to many medical conditions with their child and issues with child birth such as ‘higher stillbirth rates and increased risk of childhood asthma and allergies.’

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