Smoking while pregnant.

Now, this post is not really for men, but this is directed to women, more specially, pregnant women.........

Why is smoking harmful while pregnant?, it's not about you but it's also your child which is still developing in the womb.

Cigarette smoke contains more than 4,000 chemicals, including truly nasty things like cyanide, lead, and at least 60 cancer-causing compounds. When you smoke during pregnancy, that toxic brew gets into your bloodstream, your baby's only source of oxygen and nutrients.

While none of those 4,000-plus chemicals is good for your baby (you would never add a dollop of lead and cyanide to his strained peaches), two compounds are especially harmful: nicotine and carbon monoxide. These two toxins account for almost every smoking-related complication in pregnancy.

The most serious complications — including stillbirth, premature pregnancy, and low birth weight — can be chalked up to the fact that nicotine and carbon monoxide work together to reduce your baby's supply of oxygen. Nicotine chokes off oxygen by narrowing blood vessels throughout your body, including the ones in the umbilical cord. It's a little like forcing your baby to breathe through a narrow straw. To make matters worse, the red blood cells that carry oxygen start to pick up molecules of carbon monoxide instead. Suddenly, that narrow straw doesn't even hold as much oxygen as it should.

Besides that, it can also affect your baby's body (can be underdeveloped), size (may be smaller then usual), heart (can have defects) and metal health (low IQ, learning problems, etc).

So what can you do?

The easiest way is to simply stop smoking and while you are at it, think about other worthwhile stuff 

like eating well and exercising while preparing for childbirth.

That is all ~ Aliff Hasbi