[AustinChief]

Originally Posted by Bo's Pelini

You sure?

http://www.babycenter.com/0_how-smok...aby_1405720.bc

"Babies whose mother smoked in the first trimester of pregnancy are more likely to have a heart defect at birth.
In a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study published in February 2011, these babies' risk of having certain types of congenital heart defects was 20 to 70 percent higher than it was for babies whose moms didn't smoke. The defects included those that obstruct the flow of blood from the right side of the heart into the lungs (right ventricular outflow tract obstructions) and openings between the upper chambers of the heart (atrial septal defects)."

http://www.webmd.com/baby/smoking-during-pregnancy

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_inf...cts/pregnancy/

http://www.americanpregnancy.org/pre...h/smoking.html

And those studies don't account for the fact that OTHER FACTORS could be the cause of the defect. Actually quite a few studies do account for this but the media "conclusions" reached are where the disconnect lies.

Let me give you a completely made up but plausible example. Let's say we look at a study that examines 1000 women. 500 of those women smoke, 500 do not. Now we run the numbers and show that the 500 smokers have 5 times the incidence of birth defects. Media conclusion is... "SMOKING causing 5x increase in birth defects!!!! OMG!! OH NOES!!!" Now let's dig deeper. Let's say that the 500 non smokers are also not drinking during pregnancy and have healthy diets and access to top quality health care. Let's also say the 500 smokers have 300 women with awful diets who drank heavily and had zero doctor visits.. oh and a high occurrence of drug use. Now.. is it the smoking that caused the issues? It very well could be but the study certainly doesn't support that conclusion. The only conclusion you can reasonably draw is that SMOKERS have a higher chance of birth defects (possibly due to many other factors) not that SMOKING was the cause.

Dig deep enough and you'll see this happens all the time. It's disgusting that we swallow this bullshit whole all the time.