There was a time when people thought smoking was the pinnacle of sophistication – and everyone (and we mean everyone smoked.) Even pregnant mothers were encouraged to smoke because (surprisingly enough) manufacturers’ of that age claimed smoking helped enhanced the child’s brain development. These days, we know that this claim is the farthest thing from the truth.
This article will not tackle how smoking affects the person smoking. Rather, we will concentrate on how smoking affects the unborn child due to a mother’s smoking habit. Here are the hard-nosed facts about what smoking does to an unborn child:
One: when a mother smokes, she is basically feeding her child toxic chemicals – and we all know that that is never good. An unborn child is heavily dependent on the nutrition the mother takes during pregnancy. This is why expecting mothers are advised to follow specific diets, and maybe stock up on supplementary minerals and vitamins. When a mother smokes, the chemical compounds within those cigarettes enter her system through her lungs. The blood circulating within those lungs are contaminated with those chemical compounds and travels all throughout the body. Having nowhere else to go, these compounds are slowly concentrated through the bloodstream and eventually pass through the umbilical cord. This is the only lifeline to nutrition and oxygen that the unborn child has.
The two most toxic substances that a smoking mother inadvertently feeds her unborn child are nicotine and carbon monoxide. In case that is not horrifying enough, you may want to check out cigarette pack labels and see what other chemical additives the child is ingesting.
The ingestion of these chemical compounds is the reason why unborn children suffer from low birth weight and even premature delivery. I mean, honestly… a full grown adult’s health will suffer extensively if cancer inducing chemical compounds become part of his or her daily diet. This is also the reason why smoking mothers often have a 66% chance of delivering stillborns.
Two: when a mother smokes, the oxygen level in the mother’s blood mainstream is lowered considerably. In fact, carbon monoxide often replenishes the lost oxygen in the blood. Oxygen is the life force of all human beings, it is the one thing we need to breathe and the one element that the human brain must constantly have. The popular concept is that when human beings are deprived of air, our lungs collapse and we eventually die. This, however, is not quite accurate.
If a person, a normal healthy person, is deprived air, or to be more precise: of the correct amount of oxygen he or she needs, the brain slowly begins to die. Parts of the brain that is deprived most of oxygen slowly turns off the bodily functions that they are assigned to. When the part of the brain responsible for the respiratory system erodes, our lungs eventually stop. But it is the brain that dies first.
Unfortunately, an unborn child goes through the same hardship every time his or her mother lights up. With very little oxygen to supply the unborn one’s brain, his overall development is stunted, making his tiny brain work on a slower drive. This is actually an automatic survival reflex that the human body has, slowing down all metabolism and further development in hopes that with the very little nutrition or oxygen the body has, there is a continuation of life. This makes the child underdeveloped and poorly formed. If we are to look at worst case scenarios, lack of oxygen to the brain is the leading cause of brain deaths to many unborn children.
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