Here's a stat to depress the heck out of you: in some developing countries, more than 3/4 of pregnant women have tried cigarettes.
Reuters reports on a study released by the National Cancer Institute's Tobacco Control Research Branch. 8,000 women in countries such as Argentina and Uruguay were interviewed. The findings were less than encouraging. In the past, about 9 percent of pregnant women surveyed were smokers. Now that number is 18 percent. It is possible that this number could be skewed by the 75% of women in Argentina who had "tried" smoking, and 78% in Uruguay. And that's not all: "Smokeless tobacco was used by a third of the women in the Indian state of Orissa," that means chaw. In Pakistan, second-hand smoke is the big problem, although it's also a problem in Brazil and other sites included in the study.
As a former nicotine nut, I just can't imagine puffing around my kids. Of course, I quit well before fatherhood, and the culture of the country was moving heavily in the direction of non-smokers: I finally managed to kick the habit when taxes pushed the price of a pack to two dollars (this was not, you might say, last Tuesday), and the college I was at made a rule that you had to be 50 feet from a building in order to light up. I realized that it was not actually possible to do this since the school is on an urban campus. If societal norms had stayed smoker-friendly (see Mad Men for a view of that hazy time in our nation's history), I don't know that I would have quit so quickly.
Update: for a related post, check out Madeline Holler's take on smoking in movies, which is in response to Eric Alterman's post on MediaMatters. Alterman is upset that a film he took two 9 year olds to "glorified" cigarette smoking. The film, however, is PG-13, which kind of puts an enormous gaping hole in his argument.
image: Archive.org
