The bad effects of alcoholism, smoking, and drug use are well known and widespread. While engaging in these unhealthy habits are harmful by themselves, it becomes a hundred times over when done during pregnancy, often leading to birth complications in the newborn.
Birth defects – these are what excessive smoking, drinking, drug-using pregnant mothers get almost all the time. Each of these three harmful substances has profound effects on an unborn baby’s development – something that, unfortunately, do not seem to daunt some mothers still.
Technically, not all drugs – meaning, medication – are harmful and lead to complications in childbirth. It is illegal drugs – cocaine, heroin, etc. – that are. Still, prescription drugs taken in excessive amounts can also be harmful. Smoking before childbirth, meanwhile, is like feeding the unborn child over 4,000 chemicals used to produce insecticide and rat poison, among others. The harmful chemicals in cigarette smoke enter the bloodstream – baby’s only source of oxygen and nourishment. The nicotine in cigarette allows for little oxygen to pass by the bloodstream, thereby allowing little oxygen to reach your baby before birth.
These habits either retard baby’s development or cause numerous birth defects that may, in certain cases, aggravate to miscarriage or death upon childbirth.
These childbirth defects most often affect the body’s critical areas that develop first during the first ten weeks of pregnancy – the heart, limbs, and the face. Facial malformations are common in childbirths associated with these bad habits, as are congenital heart diseases, and the inability of the baby to walk.
Sometimes, these are also to blame for premature births, or babies born very small for their age. Premature births result in days spent in an incubator for specialized treatment, and sometimes even with respirators because babies were born with very weak, underdeveloped lungs for breathing.
These birth defects sadly do not end at birth, and may actually stretch to the baby’s lifetime if not remedied early and properly. Complications at birth may eventually lead to learning problems, poor memory, not to mention social ridicule towards children with bodily malformations.
Childbirths linked to bad habits, thankfully, are fully preventable through discipline. But as it is, there still are mothers who cannot quit smoking, drinking, or using drugs before childbirth, exposing their children to harm even they perhaps cannot imagine.
In the case of preventing birth defects, the best solution is the easiest to do – quitting in time for birth. While quitting smoking, drugs, or alcoholism overnight is no mean feat, raising a child with abnormalities and malformations will not be worth nine months of continued self-gratification before birth, especially for your baby.
