Pregnant women feel guilty when they smoke

The University of Buffalo in America has been given a £1,000,000 grant to conduct research into the emotional and psychological aspects of smoking which it is hoped will help to formulate a smoking cessation treatment plan for women who are pregnant. Everybody knows that women who smoke when they are expecting are far more likely to damage their fetuses then women who do not smoke. The pregnant women know this also but the strong nicotine addiction overrides their feeling of concern for the child and they nevertheless continue smoking.

In America it is estimated that around eleven percent of women continue to smoke when they are pregnant despite all the health warnings that they receive. According to Clara M. Bradizza who is leading this research project pregnant women who are smoking have to deal with many different emotions concerning their nicotine addiction which need to be addressed in the research.

The research will largely be on a psychological level which hopes to get women to break the link between feeling negative emotions and lighting up a cigarette. Pregnant women feel guilty when they smoke and this guilt causes them to suffer intensely negative emotions which they try to deal with by smoking even more.

The negative statistics regarding smoking and pregnancy are considerable, for example it is estimated that in America if all women quit smoking when they were pregnant it would produce an eleven percent fall in the amount of stillborn babies every year as well as a 5 percent reduction in the number of newborn deaths.

Babies born to those women who smoke also tend to have a lower birth weight and some people say that they are more likely to suffer from health complications throughout their lives. Both men and women who smoke are also noted to be less fertile and doctors advise that women should try to give up smoking at least a year before they attempt to get pregnant.