Doctors urge help for women seeking to stub out habit

Doctors specialising in care of mothers-to-be have called for greater access during pregnancy to smoking cessation programmes after an audit of baby deaths showed more than a sixth of the women who suffered perinatal loss were smokers.

Perinatal mortality refers to the death of a baby in the weeks before or after birth.

While the authors of the Perinatal Mortality in Ireland Annual Report 2011 did not directly blame smoking for causing any of the 491 infant deaths that year, they said getting the women to quit was “one of the most effective health interventions for improving perinatal outcomes”. The authors said “smo-king cessation requires priority” during pregnancy.