One in 7 Pregnant Australians Do This. And it is Not Good

One in seven Australian women smoke during their pregnancy.

When I first read this statistic, I read it incorrectly. I thought: ‘Oh, only one in seven. That means six in seven quit. I mean, it’s not ideal. But, hey? At least the message is getting through.’

Unfortunately, that’s not what this figure says. One in seven Australian women. Not one in seven Australian female smokers; one in seven Australian women. So, for every seven pregnant women who walk past you in the street, one of them is smoking.

But there’s something that’s scarier: it’s roughly the same figure for women as a whole.

So, what does this mean? It means that women aren’t giving up smoking during pregnancy.  It means that the message about smoking during pregnancy increasing the risk of the child being delivered prematurely, suffering from SIDS or being miscarried isn’t getting through.

To combat this, the Federal Government has launched a new advertising initiative, ‘Quit For You, Quit For Two.’

Related : 10 steps to quitting smoking when you are pregnant

Related: We can help you quit

The campaign will run across print, TV, radio and social media, with a focus on supporting women, rather than shaming them.

Federal Health Minister, Tayna Plibersek, said: “Education and support are the best ways forward for helping people give up. We know that tobacco is a very strong addiction.” She added: “I’m sure that most women who are smoking while they’re pregnant would want to give up.”

The new campaign is part of an initiative to bring down national smoking rates to 10% of the population by 2018. Other aspects of the government’s renewed focus on cutting down Australia’s smoking population include other advertising campaigns targeted at Indigenous communities and the wider public, as well as plain packaging for cigarette boxes from December 1^st.

While world-first initiatives such as plain packaging are great for making smoking a less appealing past time, the reality is that if one in seven women are compromising the health of their babies due to a crippling addiction, something is wrong.

It’s not just wrong for the term of the pregnancy, but it’s wrong for the years afterwards. A lack of successful initiatives in the early stages of parenthood have meant that women are left unable to beat their addictions. If you can’t quit during pregnancy, what chance do you have of quitting when your child is walking, and at risk of asthma, poor lung development, ADHD, middle ear disease and becoming a smoker themselves?

One in seven women smoke during pregnancy.

Hopefully soon that statistic will be ‘one in seven women smokers continue to smoke during pregnancy.’ And I’ll think, whenever I see a female smoker, that there’s a six in seven chance that they won’t let their habit affect their unborn baby.

Hopefully.