I was about to mention that. It's also women avoiding the pregnancy police. I'm not pro smoking my any means but after seeing what my sister-in-law went though to drink iced tea, among other things, when we went on vacation, I can't blame them.

Wow, they had issues serving her iced tea? People are really becoming far too vested in the lives of others. Granted, I'm not saying that smoking is a fine thing to do while pregnant (or any time, really), but the last I checked, it was still legal for people over the age of 18.

It's shocking and frightening to witness women losing their civil rights simply because they are expecting. Whether anyone agrees with the behaviors, whether they are harmful, it is not anyone else's concern other than the mother/father. Before anyone jumps up with "My tax money will pay for their stupidity", perhaps we should just cut off all monetary assistance to those in need, period. No longer let it be taken from taxes, but simply from philanthropic donations.

I know, the next outcry will be "But there won't be enough money! People will die!", and that's life. There are no promises that every life will last until 84.5 years, life's a crap shoot and people really need to get on with it. Stop being such crybabies and nosey do-gooders.

I also wonder if the test would pick up byproducts from nicotine patches or gum (though I'm not sure if either of these are safe for a developing fetus)?

EmilyinIowa, that is a very good point.

I'm waiting for the study that tries to determine if the 600% increase in autism in our children in the last 20 years is the result of fewer smokers...

And no, I'm not making the correlation in any seriousness. I'm just sick and tired of seeing stories like this, especially when people's privacy rights are being violated, and I don't care WHAT the reason is.

In tandem with EmilyinIowa's idea above, I wonder how many of those women tested worked in environments where people smoked around them and in enclosed areas.

We have none of this information from the article.

How is their privacy being violated? I didn't see any personally identifiable information in the results. It's important to identify the accuracy of self-reporting, whether the discrepancies are due to dishonesty, second-hand smoke, or quit-smoking aids. It definitely inspires us to take a closer look at the data from previous studies, and may help us to provide more accurate information to pregnant women about the risks of smoking to their unborn babies.

I'd certainly want to know if I had elevated cotinine levels while pregnant, especially if I was unaware of it (due to underestimated second-hand smoke exposure, for instance)!

Honesty??? The medical staff is performing unauthorized urinalysis without informed consent to find the nicotine and yet are complaining about their patient honesty? How far do you think this should go? I call it an invasion of privacy all in name of statistics for the anti-smoking/big pharma groups.

I agree- it is a complete invasion of privacy to do these tests assuming they didn't inform the patients. Maybe they signed a waver for the study or knew the test was to be preformed but lied anyway? I hope that the individual results were at least kept confidential. Tests like these decrease the trust between patients and doctors and are a barrier for women to seek pre-natal care.

Give me a break.

If you are smoking while you are pregnant, you should be shamed. You are putting your baby at risk.

There's a big difference between an iced tea and a smoking habit.

If you don't want to give up cigarettes, don't get pregnant.

Yeah because that's going so well for AIDS, alcohol, meth, and cocaine...get over yourself you DON'T get to decide who's allowed to get pregnant.

It's unlikely that the doctors who interviewed the patients and provided prenatal care were the ones performing this study. The results of the questionnaires and the lab work were probably submitted to a third party, and assigned numbers instead of patient names.

This is common, because the most reliable research comes from double-blind studies. That means the subjects (in this case, patients) are not informed about what they are getting (in this case, bloodwork), and neither are the data collectors (in this case, doctors and lab technicians). Only the researchers get to see the data, so that they are not biased.

In a double-blind study, the doctors wouldn't even see the results of the lab work... it probably went directly to the researchers, who paid for the analysis. Why would they bother to send the results back to the doctor? First of all, that would be an added expense. Second of all, doctors usually order their own labwork when needed, and they bill the patient for this; they can't bill the patient if they sneaked the labwork! Thirdly, researchers don't release any of their data until it is published in a scientific journal - not to doctors, patients, or curious minds. That would sabotage the double-blind nature of the study. And their goal isn't to call out specific patients on their b.s.; it's to get published in a prestigious medical journal.

Privacy wouldn't be an issue at all. The only person connecting the dots would be a researcher who never met the patient, and had no personally identifiable information about the patient.

These were also the same women that swore to someone they were on birth control. lol So many women don't live in reality.

The same can be said of lunch meat, coffee, sushi, tea, soda, sugar, soft cheeses, raw eggs, shellfish, peanuts, liver etc...

They also shouldn't take hot baths, smoke, drink, dye their hair, paint their finger and toe nails, hike, and a world of other things.

Pregnant women are still adults and citizens. If they want to eat sushi, they can eat sushi. And there's not a thing you can do to stop it. After what we saw happen on vacation over and over again my husband and I have already decided that should we also have children anyone sticking their nose where it has no business being will be told exactly where to stick it.

"No blood was sneaked from them and no one bashed them on the head for doing it or lying."...BS, yes the interviewers lied and listed a whole host of tests that would be run...none of them smoking related. But they conveniently listed environment chemicals after a list of specific chemicals like mercury and cadmium to mask their intent.

FYI- I accidentally hit the agree button instead of reply so you have yet to have someone agree with your statement.

The following link shows what they listed/lied about as the basis of this study and how they "guesstimated" their percentages.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/testcomp.htm

If they informed the patients that they'd be testing for cotinine, then they wouldn't get accurate results. Patients either wouldn't lie, or wouldn't participate, if they knew the labwork would out them. Then we'd never be able to evaluate the reliability of self-reporting, so the risk factors associated with prenatal smoking would be forever underestimated. Then doctors wouldn't be able to give their patients as accurate of information about the importance of not smoking. Sorry, but that defeats the point of the study.

It's important to patients to know the likelihood of risks, not just that there are risks. For example, I know there is a risk of newborns getting ill from contracting Step B (a harmless bacteria in adults). I also know that being hooked up to an IV for antibiotics interferes with comfort and mobility during labor. Because only 1% of newborns infected with Strep B experience any illness, I opted out of the antibiotics. If the risk was, say, 10% chance of illness, then I'd go ahead and get the antibiotics.

I suspect that smokers utilize statistics too. If they know their baby has, say, a 2% chance of low birth weight, they probably won't stress themselves out with quitting. But if it turns out the risk is like 20%, I bet more of them would opt to quit. The statistics we currently have are not going to be very accurate if 25% of babies were analyzed in the wrong group!

Uhh. He doesn't deny that he smokes, he has said often that he is trying to quit. People like you that take every opportunity available to insert Obama's name into completely unrelated things should go apply for a job working for Glenn Beck or Bill O'reilly so that we can confine all you morons into one small space for target practice with all those guns you guys think people should be allowed to have.

Yes, anyone who disagrees with your political affiliation should be rounded up and shot...

You are equating an adult male hiding his smoking habit with a pregnant woman's smoking?!? You wing nuts are clueless!

Irony is lost on JLM-268998.

While I think you have a point, I think they are more scared of being shamed or of having their parental rights at risk then being "forced to quit". These are real fears and I think that for the health of everyone, it would be better to provide non-judgmental health care with all the facts (including the fact that cigarette smoke as well as other drugs and alcohol has a serious if not deadly effect on a fetus). Parents generally care more about their own children then anyone else, it would be better to acknowledge this and help them to be the best parents they can be then to make them so scared that they do not access help.

I think you're missing the point, Emily. They didn't perform this study so they could go back and tell the closet smokers, "Gotcha!" I guarantee you they didn't do this. Nor is Child Protective Services called when parents smoke. So shame and parental rights are irrelevant to this study.

Rather, the point of this study was to see how reliable self-reporting was. If 12% of nonsmokers give birth to premature babies, and 36% of smokers do, then the scientific literature will say, "Smoking increases your risk of premature birth by 3-fold." Now if 25% of the "nonsmokers" are actually closet smokers, then that would mean smoking increases the risk of premature birth by 4-fold. See why it's important to test the methods?

Uh... smoking among women was rare in past centuries; historically they didn't smoke in the quantities they have for the last 100 years; cigarettes are higher in nicotine than they were 60 years ago.

Your conclusion is equally unfounded. We're not talking about the end of the world; we're talking about the survival of infants and life-long health of children.

There is hypocrisy in judging individuals. But there is nothing wrong with evaluating the consequences of certain behaviors, and discouraging people from ones that are harmful to them or their offspring. In this case, it's medical information... which is quite useful.

Interesting. I can't recall any smoking mothers in my community who were murdered for it. I wonder where they got this paranoid idea? Perhaps it wasn't tobacco these ones smoked.

My mom used to lie about being a smoker. It just made her look stupid, since she reeked of it and everyone could tell. She also denied smoking during her three pregnancies. Yeah right... she couldn't go 10 minutes without a cigarette and not kill someone. I don't buy her nine months claim.

they should be ashamed of their smoking=that is probably why they hide it-it's selfish behavior-yes i know it's an addiction-doesn't justify it though

having a baby is selfish too.merely an ego trip for those with an inferiority complex that the need to reproduce. it would be a better world without more people being born!

these so-called supermommies are simply Nazis who want everyone to behave like them, smelll like them and think like them. they should have their kids taken away from them.

I don't know, it sounds like there are a lot of smoker parents who want everyone to smell like them. They light up in public places, chain-smoke indoors with children, wear the same clothes they wore when they smoked. At least drunks keep their hobbies to themselves.

Darn those non-smoking supermoms who think every kid deserves to be healthy.

They already have the legal right to smoke. Are you suggesting people don't have the right to disapprove or campaign against the risky behavior? It sounds like a lot of talk about rights, and none of responsibility. A pregnant woman can smoke all she wants, but when it causes health problems for her or the baby, I don't hear women's rights advocates clamouring for her to take responsibility. Smokers tend to be lower on the socioeconomic ladder, so taxpayers get to take the "responsibility" for her "rights" in the form of Medicaid and social services for her and her baby, when prematurity, low birth weight, respiratory problems, asthma, lung cancer and emphysema enter the equation. Not to mention the pain and suffering of the tobacco-exposed infant that no amount of medical care can take back.

Carrying a pregnancy to term is a voluntary condition. Pretending that women's rights are an isolated issue in which no one has any vested interest is ridiculous. There just so happens to be another body in there, and though it doesn't have legal rights yet, it will at birth... and at that point, it gets to inherit all the consequences of the mothers' "rights." Those rights that didn't come with responsibilities.

Thanks, JLM!

wow is all I can say about this blurb.