Anecdotal research suggests some pregnant teenagers in Australia are taking up smoking or increasing their smoking to ensure they give birth to smaller babies, according to an ABC report by Barney Porter.
The teenagers in question, pregnant for the first time, were said to be ‘quite small’ and so fearful of giving birth to large infants. They were therefore attracted by the warnings on cigarette packs that said smoking reduced a baby’s birth weight.
Simone Dennis an associate professor with the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University, was said to have taken to the streets of several state capital cities to record the reaction of smokers to laws regulating their habit.
Dennis told the ABC that her research had found overall that people were creative in incorporating the health warnings on standardized packs, introduced in 2012, into their own practice and on their own terms.
People, she said, were quite good at avoiding the warnings, modifying them in some way, or reading them in some ways that suited what they were already doing in their own lives. The reaction of the pregnant teenagers was said to have been ‘quite common’, and Dennis added that researchers in other Western countries also had seen this type of reaction. Simon Chapman, an emeritus professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney said however that he supported the current regime of warnings. For everyone who might take a warning the wrong way, he said, there were many, many more who were taking it in exactly the right way. Australia had the lowest rates of smoking in both adults and young people that had ever been recorded because people who hadn’t taken up smoking or who had quit had acted in the way that they did because, overwhelmingly, they were concerned about the health effects.