Cathie Rowand | the Journal Gazette Tamara Howard, who expects a baby in November, is a client of Healthier Moms and Babies and quit smoking because of her pregnancy.
It didn’t take long for smoking to become part of Tamara Howard’s life.
Around age 18, she picked up the habit – in part because it was always there.
When she learned she was pregnant with her second child last spring, she kicked it.
“I said, ‘OK, my child is way more important than any addiction,’ ” she said.
Howard’s success story is the kind that public health advocates love to hear, but they say it isn’t common enough in a state where, in some counties, more than a third of pregnant women smoke.
Nationally, about one in 10 pregnant women smokes, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which analyzes data related to disadvantaged children in the United States. That number is much higher in Indiana, where only three Indiana counties are lower than the national average, according to the Casey Foundation.
Allen County isn’t one of them; about 15 percent of pregnant women in the county smoke.
Howard’s personal battle with smoking is both unusual and common: Unusual because she took up smoking as an adult, but common because she said hanging out with other smokers contributed to her picking up the habit.
Her mother smokes, as does her oldest sister, with whom she was living. Even Howard’s boyfriend smoked. Howard, an aspiring rapper, also was often hanging out in smoke-filled clubs and bars.
It was part of her life.
She became a young mother just before her 18th birthday. She did not smoke during her first pregnancy, but when she turned 18, she began taking occasional puffs of her family and friends’ cigarettes – just to tease them, she said.
“I started as a joke,” she said.
Then she began buying cigarettes – supposedly for those same family members and friends. but she found she was smoking “as a joke” more and more often and finally was forced to admit she was buying the cigarettes for herself.
Disappointed in herself, Howard said she tried not to smoke in front of her daughter and would go outside to light up. That is, until this year, when she learned she was about six weeks pregnant with her second child and got serious about quitting.
Babies at risk
Howard is a client of Healthier Moms and Babies, an outreach project aimed at reducing infant mortality by providing health education and case management to at-risk families.
Executive Director Sally Edington said success stories such as Howard’s are too uncommon – and not because women don’t realize the habit is unhealthy.
The March of Dimes, which advocates for healthy babies, says if all pregnant women in the U.S. stopped smoking, there would be an estimated 11 percent reduction in stillbirths and a 5 percent reduction in newborn deaths. Babies whose mothers smoked during pregnancy are up to three times as likely to die from sudden infant death syndrome as babies of non-smokers, according to the March of Dimes.
Other effects are more common and better known: Smoking nearly doubles a woman’s risk of having a low-birth-weight baby, slows fetal growth and increases the risk of preterm delivery.
Healthier Moms and Babies’ Edington believes many women who smoke hear only small-baby-versus-large-baby when it comes to the issue of low birth weight and think they’d prefer a smaller baby.
“There’s a tendency to rely on modern medicine,” she said. “there aren’t that many women who don’t know the risks. they don’t view them as risks.”
Edington recently completed a class on smoking cessation, but she said her caseworkers’ roles as educators only go so far. That’s why Healthier Moms and Babies works to encourage local physicians to tell expectant mothers, on every visit, the dangers of smoking to an unborn child.
“they will take it more seriously if it comes from their doctor,” she said.
Edington said Healthier Moms and Babies receives fewer referrals of pregnant women who smoke than when she first joined the agency in the late 1990s. but she can count on one hand the number of women she believes she played a role in persuading to quit.
“It’s just really hard to get people who don’t want to quit, to quit,” she said.
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