While its been scientifically proven that smoking during pregnancy can lead to serious health problems for the child after birth, woman across the United States continue to puff while pregnant.
A new CDC report reveals that a shocking 30.5 per cent of women in West Virginia continued to smoke into the last three months of their pregnancy.
New York City, on the other hand, had one of the lowest smoking rates, with just 2.3 per cent of pregnant women admitting to the hazardous activity.
Bad habits: A new report by the CDC shows that many American women are continuing to smoke while pregnant. The darkest colored states are the places with the highest percentage of pregnant smokers
For the love of the baby: The above graphs shows the overall trend that most female smokers quit when they become pregnant
Giving up: The number of mothers continuing to smoke while pregnant has been decreasing on trend with woman as a whole since the 90s
An earlier report compared pregnancy smoking rates among different ethnic and age groups.
Around 30 per cent of American Indian women smoked while pregnant in 2000, but that number had nosedived by 2004, going below 20 per cent. However, the graph shows the rate shooting up again after that year.
Alaskan Natives are the group that by far smokes the most during pregnancy, hitting a high of around 40 per cent in 2001, with Hispanics smoking the least.
Age also seems to be a factor in whether women continue smoking into pregnancy.
Ethnic breakdown: Alaskan Natives have one of the highest rates of pregnancy smoking in the United States
Too young to understand: Women younger than 20 to 24 have a higher percentage of smoking while pregnant
Perhaps unsuprisingly, the younger a woman is the more likely she is to continue smoking. Around 20 per cent of women younger than 20 to 24 continue to smoke while older women ages 25 to older than 35 hover around the 10 per cent mark.
The CDC warns however that the numbers were self-reported which means pregnant women feeling guilty about smoking could have lied about continuing to smoke or quitting.
The good news is, the percentage of women who smoke while pregnant is considerably less than those who smoke before pregnancy and after delivery.
The trend as a whole is falling as well. From 1989 to 2006, the percentage of births where the mother smoked during pregnancy decreased by half, from 20 to 10 per cent.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2530733/Marlboro-MOM-Country-Map-shows-states-pregnant-women-smoke-most.html#ixzz2ouKvwTmn
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