Smoking While Pregnant

Unlit filtered cigarettes
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Smoking While Pregnant

I know that there is an addition issue, but smoking and drinking while pregnant is just not acceptable.  The challenge in either drinking or smoking while pregnant is that the compounds in the cigarette smoke or alcohol get into your baby’s blood stream as well as your own.  The high that is provided by smoking or by drinking alcohol is created when the active compound enters your blood stream either though your intestines, or through your lungs.  Once those compounds enter the blood stream, they react with different cells in your body to create the expected feeling.  While those compounds are doing their business, your liver is busy trying to metabolize them and remove them from your body.  If you think about alcohol and cigarette smoke as toxins, after you consume them, you liver does the best it can to detoxify them so that the toxins from smoking and alcohol can be removed from the body.

For a normal adult, this process of metabolizing toxins from alcohol and cigarette smoke is energy and labor intensive, but the liver does a decent job.  If exposure happens daily, or you overdose, the liver can get overloaded and starts to get damaged which results in cirrhosis.  Now if you are smoking or drinking while pregnant, you share the cigarette and alcohol toxins in your blood stream with your baby. If you have a normal dose of alcohol, your baby essentially gets that same dose.

Unfortunately, your baby’s liver is much, much smaller than yours and a normal dose of alcohol or nicotine for you is a huge dose for your baby.  There are a number of protection mechanisms in place to help your baby survive exposure to toxins while pregnant, but constant exposure can take its toll.

Overall, the best approach is to avoid alcohol and stop smoking
while pregnant.  A single drink of wine every day may be okay, and some studies show that the compounds in the wine may be helpful, but never consume enough to get drunk while pregnant.  It’s just not worth it to the health of your baby.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 9:25 am and is filed under while pregnant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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