A 10-year study into smoking in Australia has revealed that girls as young as 16 are taking up smoking in an attempt to reduce the birth weight of their unborn babies, as they are scared of the pain when giving birth.

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So apparently expectant mothers are more worried about the pain that would come from giving birth to a normal sized baby than they are of the risks associated with smoking while pregnant such as higher stillbirth rates and increased risk of childhood asthma and allergies. That’s some pretty dumb logic there, but then I probably would have thought the same dumb shit back when I was a teenager, hence why I didn’t get pregnant.

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Associate Professor Simone Dennis, of the Australian National University, said:

They had read on packets that smoking can reduce the birth weight of your baby, which is obviously not how the public health message is intended to be taken.

They were scared because they were small. The worst thing that could happen to them was to have an enormous baby.

Some were young, 16 or 17 years, and their overriding fear was ‘Oh my God, I’m going to have an enormous child’, so they were actively using cigarettes to medicate against that.

Some had even taken it up for the first time for that very reason, and some smoked harder, hoping the promise on the packet would come true. If you smoked more, you could make it better. I was really struck by that.

Yeah, pretty shocking. Smoking while pregnant to purposely have a low weight baby just shows that these girls are too young to be responsible for the life of a child. Maybe they should check out our top 5 reasons why everyone should put down the cigarette and stop smoking right now.