Smoking during pregnancy will have a great impact on your baby
Cigarette is an abundant source of chemicals, including nicotine, carbon monoxide, and numerous other poisons. When you smoke, these chemicals travels through your bloodstream and go directly to your baby.
Weight
On average, smoking during pregnancy will make your baby lighter than other newborns. Generally, a pack-a-day habit shave about a half-pound from a baby's birth weight. Smoking two packs a day throughout your pregnancy could make your baby a full pound or more lighter. Maybe there are some women who welcome the prospect of delivering a smaller baby, however, low birth weight stunts a baby's growth in the womb. What's worse, it increases the risk of cot death.
Body and lungs
Undersize babies tend to have underdeveloped bodies. Their lungs may not be ready to work on their own, which means they may spend their first days or weeks attached to a respirator. After they're breathing on their own (or even if they did from the start), these babies may have continuing breathing problems — because of delayed lung development or other adverse effects of nicotine. Children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy are especially vulnerable to asthma, and have double or even triple the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
Heart
If you smoked in the first trimester of pregnancy, your baby is more likely to have a heart defect at birth. It is reported that these babies' risk of having certain types of congenital heart defects was 20 to 70 percent higher than it was for babies whose moms didn't smoke. The defects included those that obstruct the flow of blood from the right side of the heart into the lungs (right ventricular outflow tract obstructions) and openings between the upper chambers of the heart (atrial septal defects).
Brain function
Smoking during pregnancy will have lifelong impacts on your baby's brain. If you smoke during pregnancy, your baby are more likely to have learning disorders, behavioral problems, and relatively low IQs.
Ears
Your baby will run a higher risk of getting ear infections like the inflammation of the middle ear in childhood.
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