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“More women are making the right choice and are not smoking during pregnancy, yet too many--almost half a million in 1999--smoked while pregnant,” said Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director Dr. Jeffrey Kaplan. According to a recent CDC report, the government’s first analysis of smoking and pregnancy in the decade, 12.3 percent of women reported smoking during pregnancy in 1999, down from 18.4 percent in 1990. The rate dropped each year during the decade, declining across both racial and ethnic lines.

Although smoking by pregnant women dropped by one-third in the 1990s, with a particularly sharp decline among women in their late 20s and early 30s, health officials are concerned by the disturbing trend among pregnant teen-agers to smoke (a marked increase since the mid-1990s). Smoking by pregnant women 18 and 19 years old dropped early in the decade but then rebounded, climbing to nearly one in five by 1999.
“It’s very troubling,” said T.J. Mathews, a demographer with the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. “There needs to be a focused (anti-smoking) effort toward this specific population.”

Smoking during pregnancy has been linked to low birthweight, retardation and even criminal behavior in adulthood. Research also has linked it with behavioral problems in children.