Why should you quit smoking? | Smoking during pregnancy

Why should you quit smoking?

With or without pregnancy you should stop smoking. This is well known and the damage that smoking causes in adults should not be neglected. In the unborn child it is added that the child cannot avoid the nicotine that passes into the bloodstream.

It is therefore in the true sense of the word a physical injury committed on the unborn child. One should definitely stop smoking or at least pause smoking consistently during pregnancy in order not to endanger the life and health of the child. Most children of smoking mothers are much lighter and smaller at birth, and in later life they are still at least smaller.

Often there is also either a miscarriage or stillbirth. A trauma that will also occupy the mother for a long time. Maldevelopment of hands, feet or fingers can occur and must be avoided at all costs for this reason.

Chronic diseases such as lung and respiratory diseases are often found in children whose parents smoked.Also, an excessive number of allergies can occur. Intelligence deficits, learning disorders and language development disorders are more common in children of pregnant women who smoke. If you are aware that the toxins you inhale pass directly into the child and cause sometimes irreparable damage, it becomes clear how important it is to stop smoking immediately during pregnancy. Furthermore, one should of course also avoid alcohol (see: Alcohol during pregnancy) and certain medications during pregnancy and pay attention to a healthy diet (see: Nutrition during pregnancy).

Is smoking during pregnancy a criminal offence?

By definition, the consumption of alcohol, drugs or cigarettes during pregnancy is a bodily injury to the expectant child. It is a criminal offence, which should also be punished but is not. The background is not so much that someone doubts that nicotine consumption during pregnancy is an assault, but rather that a fetus is not a person in the legal system.

For example, a court in England was unable to convict a mother who used excessive alcohol and drugs during pregnancy and whose child suffered severe consequential harm, because the child is not a person in the legal system. In the legal sense, smoking is therefore not punishable and will not be prosecuted. Rather, it is based on reason and the moral situation that exists between mother-to-be and unborn child.

Incidentally, it is also often not known which mothers have smoked and which have not. Only pronounced consequential damages could indicate this. The mothers would therefore have to be prosecuted afterwards, which is practically impossible. How long this legal gray area will continue to exist or whether there will be a rewriting of the legal situation regarding the legal status of the unborn child at some point in the future remains open.