Don't bring harm to your unborn child
Smoking is bad for your health. We know that, the 'scare' stories are everywhere, even the box that you take one of the little cancer sticks from.
But are you as aware of the implications of smoking whilst pregnant? It seems not.
In England and Wales 17 per cent of women smoke whilst pregnant, and a staggering 45 per cent of under 20s are doing it too.
In a new study, which made calculations based on 172 papers from over the last 50 years, they have found that your unborn child has a 25 per cent higher risk of having missing or deformed limbs when born.
Researchers estimate that several hundred babies are born with a physical defect.
Professor Allan Hackshaw, who led the research, suspects many women who smoke while pregnant do not know about these risks.
"There's still this idea among some women that if you smoke the baby will be small and that will make it easier when it comes to the delivery.
"But what is not appreciated is that smoking during pregnancy increases the risk of defects in the child that are life-long."
If you smoke whilst pregnant your child is 50 per cent more likely to gastroschisis. A defect were parts of the stomach or intestines protude through the skin. They are 33 per cent more likely to suffer from skull defects, 25 per cent chance of developing eye defects and 28 per cent more chance of being born with a cleft lip, palate or clubfoot.
Of the 700,000 babies born each year in England and Wales, around 120,000 of them are born to mums who smoke.
Professor Hackshaw says very few public health educational policies mention birth defects when referring to smoking and those that do are not very specific - this is largely because of past uncertainty over which ones are directly linked.
"Now we have this evidence, advice should be more explicit about the kinds of serious defects such as deformed limbs, and facial and gastrointestinal malformations that babies of mothers who smoke during pregnancy could suffer from," he says.
Stub it out and don't let the risks of any of these increase with your own unborn, helpless child.
Femalefirst Taryn Davies