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Chapter 10: Smoking and Low Birth Weight
Everyone knows pregnant women
should not smoke. Why? Because smoking causes babies to be
underweight. But, does it really? After all, it is already well known that most
smokers come from the lower social classes and that same group of people tend to
be unhealthy anyway – largely resulting from eating food of poor nutritional
value.
I suspect that this is where the
answer lies: it is no secret that the food the mother eats is what helps her
baby to develop, and thus food is very important. If a mother eats nutritionally poor food, her
baby will not develop as well as it should have or could have. Thus, here emerges the statistical link
between smoking and low birth weight: a woman from a low social class smokes
cigarettes and eats unhealthy food. As a
result of her unhealthy eating, she gives birth to an underweight baby. However, she gets labelled as a smoker, and
thus when smokers are studied statistically it appears that smokers have
underweight babies – which means, of course, that smoking causes low birth
weight in newborns! With one problem – it does not mean that at all.
Correlation does not mean
causation, and in that example smoking is no more a useless factor than, say,
reading a magazine (statistically, of course, most pregnant women will read a
magazine. That in no way means reading
that magazine results in underweight children though) – what really caused her
baby to be underweight was malnutrition.
In other words, the notion that smoking will lead to an underweight baby
is nothing more than another ailment to afflict the lower social classes, and
nothing more than proof that that group of people are unhealthier than people
from the higher classes. An important
point I have referred to more than once is that after World War Two, over 85% of
Americans smoked. What this means is if
smoking really did lead to low birth weight, a whole generation (or at least, a
very significant part of it) would have been underweight at birth. Accordingly, this would have led to increased
numbers of infant mortality, and higher incidence of illness and disease later
in life. Then, in turn, the next
generation would have been healthier and bigger. This did not happen, and people in the 1950s
and 1960s lived longer than people in the 1930s and 1940s. Once again, looking at the bigger picture
serves as an arrow through the heart of the anti-smoking crusade. Of course, a simple theory will not suffice to
win the war, so a look at the evidence is necessary.
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