It's My Baby (& I'll Smoke If I Want To)

I love abusing song lyrics... That one was originally "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to" and popularised in 1981 by Dave Stuart and Barbara Gaskin's number 1 cover.

Anyhoo...

Anyone who reads this blog regularly (or knows me personally) will tell you that I'm very, very, pro-choice (pro-abortion if you want to be inflammatory). It's not that I think we should use abortion as a primary means of contraception, but I strongly believe in a woman's right to make informed choices without legislation saying otherwise.

So what I'm about to say may now surprise you: foetuses deserve better than smoking mothers.

In the west, smoking is a personal choice as is pregnancy for the most part. We hear of "accidents" all the time but in reality you can, for the most part, replace accident with hubris, carelessness or downright bloody-mindedness.

A new survey reported at the BBC suggests that one quarter of pregnant smokers fear telling their GP, health visitor or midwife about their habit because of (I love this) "worries about being criticised."

Naw! You don't say! (Apparently, over 50% of those questioned in a separate poll were of the same view.)

Dr. Miriam Stoppard (please tell me this was quoted out of context) says on the site:

"Pregnant women who smoke do not automatically find it easy to stop smoking as soon as they become pregnant."

No shit Sherlock! My question is what the fuck are they doing trying to conceive while the are still addicted to weed?

I've always felt something ambivalent over the smoking ban. On the one hand if people chose to slowly kill themselves, that's fine by me; on the other, I do like to go into a pub and not be assaulted by the odoriferous wafting of stale tobacco smoke.

An unborn child has no such choice.

Every single atom of oxygen it uses while attached to its mother's placenta has to come via the mother's lungs. It's blood is fed oxygen and nutrients from it's mother's bloodstream and (because we didn't evolve to smoke) many toxic chemicals can cross the placental barrier: CO and nicotine being just two of them.

As as pure drug, nicotine is thought to be more addictive than Heroin (tell that to your local crack-whore) and CO - that's the stuff in car exhausts that people use to commit suicide. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you how much this effects the development of a tiny embyo.

Child abuse is a very emotive issue - yet every day, mums-to-be the world over are abusing their unborn children with a vast array of poisons entirely legally; just for the sake of a cigarette.

And then they have the bare-faced cheek to worry what we think about them!