ABSTRACT
This chapter shows a greater incidence and prevalence of smoking-related disease as women who took up smoking during and since 1980, and who continue to smoke, grow older. It suggests that since adolescents are intensely interested and involved in adapting their actual self-images to their ideal self-images, initiating cigarette smoking may represent the adoption of a set of valued personality characteristics. The chapter summarizes the major disease consequences of tobacco use for women. Cigarette smoking is a behavior with profound biomedical and psychosocial consequences across the lifespan, when examined from perspectives ranging from that of the individual all the way to that of society as a whole. To enumerate the effects of cigarette smoking on reproduction there is a dose-related reduction in birth weight which averages 200 grams, increased risk of miscarriage, spontaneous abortion, various placental abnormalities, preterm delivery, fetal death and neonatal death.
