Taxpayer pays women to quit smoking
Friday, May 22, 2009 I have just done an interview for BBC Radio Sheffield in response to THIS story about pregnant women in South Yorkshire being paid to stop smoking.
Personally I think it's a complete waste of public money. Why should the taxpayer fund this scheme? And what about the very many pregnant women who quit smoking without being bribed to do so? Don't they deserve a bob or two? (Call it an allowance. MPs do.)
As I have said before, I think women should err on the side of caution when it comes to smoking during pregnancy, but let's not exaggerate the scale of the problem. To hear the "evidence" it's a wonder that any child whose mother smokes during pregnancy survives infancy, let alone childhood.
The emphasis, for now, is on caring for mother and child. This is the nanny state at its most benevolent, happy to use public money for the "greater good". (On Radio Sheffield the woman responsible for the scheme justified the cost by comparing it to "the cost of caring for ill babies for the rest of their lives". I reminded her that children born in the Fifties, when 40 per cent of women smoked, are now living longer and healthier lives than ever before. She airily dismissed this point, arguing that people didn't know about the risks in those days.)
It won't be long before the bully state muscles in. Pregnant women caught smoking will be routinely vilified, accused of child abuse or, worse, arrested and charged with a criminal offence. We can't let that happen.
Simon Clark
I forgot to mention it but there was an outrageous article by Anne Diamond in the Daily Mirror last week. The opening line says it all: "Smoking around your kids is tantamount to child abuse". You can read it HERE.
Reader Comments (9)
My wife and I both smoke and six weeks ago we had a 8lb 10oz baby girl. My wife had an excellent pregnancy and cut her smoking down but ultimately if she had have stopped altogether the additional stress would have done more harm than any amount of cigarettes. She lied to the doctors and told them she had stopped as they constantly try and refer you to some'expert' who can prescribe nicotine replacement therapy'.
We do not smoke around our daughter but we don't leave her in front of the fire when we light it or leave her beside the car exhaust. My wife is probably a statistic somewhere since she 'stopped' smoking and the pregnancy was fine. The birth was natural and our daughter is now over 12 lbs and exceeding the health visitor's hopes.How many other women are lying?
Ultimately, I nor my wife wanted her to have any drugs, patches or gums presribed to her during her pregnancy and we are glad we stuck to that. Had she taken the NRT and there had have been a problem the blame would have been placed on the fact thatshe was a smoker and not the poisons prescribed by the NHS.
Both my parents smoked around me when I was a child because in the 60's most people smoked.
It did me no harm whatsoever.
However I think that if we got to the situation where smoking near a child was regarded as child abuse we run the danger of perfectly decent parents losing their children to council care and the institutionalised abuses that are rife in those places.
I remembered seeing this a while back but in a different publication. I couldn't find it in the other publication's archives (possibly removed)
It does make for interesting reading. If I remember correctly it was well hidden within the other publication, possibly in the hope that nobody would read it:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3365637.ece
Diamond should read the Scripps Howard report. This is a compilation of views on SIDS from coroners in the USA.
One of the conclusions of this report is that many of deaths of infants attributed to SIDS is that they did not, in fact, die from SIDS at all. The findings of this report stated that they are, instead, due to parents taking their children to bed with them and then accidentally smothering them. The coroners subsequently reported the deaths as SIDS as they felt the parents had suffered enough and that it would not be right to subject them to criminal prosecutions.
See, for one part:
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:u--mzNTBHigJ: sids-network.org/experts/scripps_article.htm+scripps+
howard+sids+coroners&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
Specky, I agree.
I have said this before, but it bears repeating, I feel.
Both my parents smoked both when mum was expecting me and later my brother. We were both 10lb plus babies and had no major illnesses, just the usual childhood ones that we all got in those days - having said that, neither of us had mumps, but I think we both had chicken pox and possibly measles.
Anyway, I am now 52, rarely, if ever get a cold and have only been off work in the past 20 years or so for stress/depression related problems.
My daughter grew up in a similar environment as both myself and her father smoked and she was so damn healthy it was unbelievable!
I used to send her to nursery when there was an outbreak of measles, mumps or chicken pox, in the hope she would catch it whilst she was young, have a mild dose and be done with it! No such luck! She carried the mumps home and gave them to her father, but that was it!
She does not smoke and never has done. She is an assistant manager in a pub/restaurant and since the smoking ban, when she has not been in any kind of smokey atmosphere she has had cold after cold after cold as well as other minor illnesses.
My brother and his family are anti just about everything, smoking, alcohol, etc and he and his lot always seem to be ailing with something or another!
Says it all for me. Smoke and you will ultimately be healthier!
It's worth looking around you at work and seeing if it is the smokers or the non smokers who are most often off sick - I did and it turned out that the smokers were rarely, if ever, off, but the non smokers were off with great regularity and even more so after the smoking ban!
Diamontes disgraceful piece in Labourlist, oops, sorry, meant to say "Mirror" is a repugnant blood-libel against the very people who've paid for her entire career.
I wonder if she applies that statement to herself as I recall she lost her son to so called cot death. I seem to remember that she smoked and helped to start the "Awareness" of smoking around babies campaign. She obviously swallowed the propoganda hook line and sinker and by making that kind of statement is still feeling gulty that she was to blame!
another waste of tax payers money by this government.
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