To be pissed off with pregnant women smoking

[boringbetty]

I know i am being hormonal and emotional but i really don't care at this moment .
Currently suffering second miscarriage in 5 months so been to the hospital again yesterday . Obviously has to go to the antenatal ward and seeing all these women outside smoking clearly heavily pregnant.
I know it is their choice bla bla but it makes me so angry . I have done nothing wrong but have lost two . I'm not saying these women should have to go through this , nobody should but just makes me angry .
To be honest I don't know why I'm writing this . I know it's up to them what they do . Just wanted to vent really

Maybe I'm being naïve but I don't think I noticed any pregnant women smoking outside the maternity wing? Even when my baby was in hospital for a long time, I didn't notice pregnant women having a fag outside. I could be completely mistaken or minding my own business.
I am very sorry for your losses OP
I disagree with smoking when pregnant (I think 99% of people do) but unfortunately not everyone is like minded and for some people it really is tough. I also don't think that smoking in pregnancy - as grim as it is - should flag a mother up as a potential abuser. Is a man smoking sitting next to the pregnant woman also a child abuser?

Littlelouse - I think your misunderstandings on the thread you've just linked to actually prove that sensible, mature people do just give up when they're pregnant (if they smoke in the first place) such as the lady you're conversing with in this screen shot.

I'm incredibly pleased for anybody who manages to quit, with or without support, whether they are sensible and mature or not. However, people's ability to quit isn't generally linked to sensibleness or maturity IME. There are several factors which do affect how difficult someone can find it to quit, including their social and economic circumstances, whether they have MH issues (this one is HUGE), how much they smoke, how long they've been smoking for, how young they were when they started, how ambivalent or positive they feel about their pregnancy, whether their partner smokes, is supportive, is abusive ...

You might like to think that everyone needs help to give up but it's just not true. Lots and lots of people, me included, just give up because it's he right thing to do! You seem to be trying to force an agenda which, if this thread is anything to go by, isn't as desperately needed as you may like to think it is.

I do have an agenda, you're correct. I want as many smokers as possible to find a way to quit, for their own health and the health of those around them. What's your agenda? Everybody has one. I can't quite work yours out because the conclusions I keep coming to aren't very nice. Do you think there's not a need to do anything about 1 in 10 women smoking at the time of delivery because in your opinion they're not 'mature' or 'sensible'? Does that mean their babies don't matter?

Again, no one is actually interested in lowering the numbers, they're just interested in having a good old froth on a Sunday afternoon.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - I think inadequate mental health support during pregnancy is a key point of women continuing to smoke. Discussion is needed to understand why people continue to smoke and what can be done about it. Shaming people and telling them they don't love their babies is hardly going to encourage them to open up and attempt to reasonably discuss.

YANBU

I'm sorry for your loss OP

My mother smoked while pregnant with me (this is during an era where it was known that you shouldn't smoke in pregnancy). I was 4lb at full term. I'm bloody lucky I don't have asthma!

Yanbu - it's their body and baby they can do what they like comments make me vom. If they were injecting heroine would people still say that no. Smoking is just as dangerous to a baby as any other drug. It just shows what kind of mothers their going to be.. Selfish ones who don't give a shite if their baby has to live with a long life of asthma or worse! Bloody morons!

Also I'm very sorry for your loss OP

It should be illegal

How do you not understand it? It's very very simple: it is your body and only you can decide what happens to it. What is the alternartive to that? There isn't one that isn't horrifying.

Exactly.

How exactly is being banned from poisoning your unborn child " horrifying" ? Only the woman should decide as it's her body?! What about the baby's body?!

Oh and Ryan froth was boring the first time it was used by the pp.

MargaretTwatyer With all due respect () those are the same stats that are in the graph I posted upthread, albeit extended 3 years to 2016.

Of course it would be unfair to compare post-2007 figures with the figures from the 70s. Which set of years would you like to use?

I see you have used 2006 as your starting point - 23.2% prevalence

Prevalence then fell very very slowly to 2012 - 22.2% prevalence. This represents a fall of 0.17% / year and 2012 prevalence is higher than it was in 2007. These are flatline figures. Prevalence actually went up from 2010-2012.

As I said in my earlier post, the fall in prevalence has increased since 2012. This is very good news, clearly has nothing to do with the smoking ban, and has happened mostly because of the success of vaping.

And what RyanStartedTheFire said.

" But being made to feel ashamed and embarrassed and knowing you're being judged just bloody might because then it becomes unpleasant for the smoker. Social pressure is an important factor in preventing smoking during pregnancy "

Well no. Otherwise pretty much every fat person would be thin. It just makes them lie about smoking and deprives the child of the extra monitoring. I reckon it's higher than 1 in 10. Certainly is round here.

Yes, 1 in 10 is a national average. In some places it's much higher and other places much lower. Broadly in line with areas of deprivation and affluence.

And yy to the futility of shaming. Since when has making people feel like a piece of shit encouraged them to care about their health?

If you smoke whilst pregnant you are deserving of all ridicule and shaming. It's disgusting. You are deliberately and willfully harming an unborn child.

How exactly is being banned from poisoning your unborn child " horrifying" ? Only the woman should decide as it's her body?! What about the baby's body?!

[Sighs] because legally the foetus doesn't have an independent existence. If you ban women from smoking/drinking/ going into heavily polluted areas of the city, you are undermining their bodily autonomy. I would prefer it if no one smoked, let alone pregnant women, but if the alternative is to compromise bodily autonomy and treating women as mere vessels for foetuses, that isn't a price worth paying. It opens the way up for women to be operated and treated against their will.

Also, how would any ban be policed? Any law that cannot be policed is a bad and.largely pointless law. What do you.propose? Police sent to gawp through the living room windows or standing in the street whipping cigarettes out of the month of women of child bearing age on the off chance they' re pregnant.

How exactly is being banned from poisoning your unborn child " horrifying" ? Only the woman should decide as it's her body?! What about the baby's body?!

Unfortunately the Law doesn't agree. Why women don't morally want to to do the best for their unborn baby I have no idea.

It's their own conscious they have to live with and if damage is caused to the baby during the pregnancy or the smoking causes health problems during infancy or childhood then hopefully the mother would feel that guilt. My experience though is that smoking parents generally don't care about the impact smoking has on their children otherwise they wouldn't do it.

It's not helping the unborn child though is it Fluffy? The only thing that will is actually tackling the problem with reasoned debate and actually speaking to the women smoking. Not likely to happen when there's people acting like you. But no one actually cares about reducing the numbers as long as they get a good dig in.

Stigma is such a big problem that NICE have had to include methods of combatting it in their guidelines:

Helping pregnant women who smoke to quit involves communicating in a sensitive, client-centred manner, particularly as some pregnant women find it difficult to say that they smoke. Such an approach is important to reduce the likelihood that some of them may miss out on the opportunity to get help.

Some women find it difficult to say that they smoke because the pressure not to smoke during pregnancy is so intense. This, in turn, makes it difficult to ensure they are offered appropriate support.

This is the reason why CO tests have been rolled out and offered to every PG woman (you can refuse, of course). Some of you get up in arms about those too because how very dare they suggest you might be a disgusting smoker.

Attitudes like these, and those on this thread, are part of the problem.

But no one actually cares about reducing the numbers as long as they get a good dig in.

Yup, that's sadly my conclusion from these threads.

You are absolutely not being unreasonable OP and you deserve a baby a hell of a lot more than these women you've seen outside the hospital.
That's awful. No one deserves a baby more.
I wouldn't snoke or drink etc do do i deserve a baby more than someone who only has an occasional sip pf wine?

I take it you don't believe that extends to the baby, who has the right to not have chemicals forced into its body? I tell you what... you fuck off
Do you insult everyone who doesn't agree with you?

It shouldn't be made illegal or the child put on a register ( really??) or where does it end?
Until the baby is born it is therights of the mother, as it should be.

Christ on a bike. You're incorrigible.

The smoking ban began mid 2007. So the only fair start date for comparison is 2006 as the last full year without the ban.

I actually made an error because I quoted the figure for men. The actual figure for 2006 was 22%. And the 2016 figure was 16.1%. Which is an even bigger drop of 5.9%. Although there were rises within that period (probably because of both a 'bounce back' from the initial drop at the bans introduction and the end of the recession) there has been a sustained drop amongst the most hardcore smokers. Smoking hasn't returned to 2006 levels.

You're also ignoring the fact that as smokers become a smaller and smaller group significant drops in the number look less significant when viewed at population level.

In other words, 5.9% of the entire population gave up after the ban. But 26.82% of smokers in total gave up after the ban. This compares to 21.4% 1996-2006, 14.3% 1986-1996 and 19% 1976-1986.

So your graph might make it look like nothing really happened post ban, but actually it encouraged the greatest ever proportion of smokers to give up.

You're looking at those statistics a bit simplistically.

""It should be illegal""

To make personal actions illegal, we need evidence and the whole situation weighing up.

The issue is that it may effect the baby.

But so does having a baby at an age that posters on here advocate. So can carrying out DIY or Sports, when pregnant, eating certain foods.

IVF leaves a trail of lost babies.

If we made it illegal before birth, then we'd have to make it illegal after birth, but we would then have to weigh up the statistics with other causes of harm to children.

You can hold your personal opinions but we don't want that level of interference in our private lives.

""I take it you don't believe that extends to the baby, who has the right to not have chemicals forced into its body?""

So do children,but if a Mum comes on here upset that her child has been given Coke etc against her wishes, she is told to calm down. We know that the chemicals etc in those drinks shouldn't be given to children.

As we know that BF is best. So who gets to draw the line?

IVF leaves a trail of lost babies.

Actually no babies are lost at all in IVF. Nor any fetuses. But some embryos are.

The big difference between the two is that smoking during pregnancy is likely to cause a life time of health issues for a living and sentient human being which will probably involve some degree of suffering. And IVF, er, won't.

A woman should have the right legally to do whatever she wants with her body whether there's a foetus in there or not. If you start questioning that, things get pretty murky pretty quickly.

And I know it's been said but where would you draw the line? I drank the occasional glass of wine when pregnant and a lot more when breastfeeding. I didn't breastfeed for the optimal 2 years, I gave my dd junk food now and then from 1 yr old, if the cars full there's usually a child on a lap or in The footwell and on and on.... no one parents perfectly.