Note: this didn’t start out being inflammatory, but I recognize that inflammatory is exactly what it has become. Do me one favor: read the whole thing before you set fire to me, ok?

Or maybe they didn’t. If they did, that’s his problem.

I am fifty years old, and the child of smoking parents. And when I say ‘smoking,’ I don’t mean ‘they were so hot they smoked.’ I mean, they constantly had cigarettes going. In the house. In the car. At parties. They’re probably smoking this minute. I think it’s safe to say that, for most of my childhood, the ONLY place they didn’t have a cigarette going was in church. My most nauseating memories of childhood were of washing the tar and nicotine sludge out ashtrays. Gag.

True fact: on a cross-country car trip in the early seventies, my parents smoked the entire way. And (and this is the part that just kills me, every time) they wouldn’t let my brother and I open windows because the a/c was on and you just didn’t open windows when the a/c was on.

Even though my formative years included massive exposure to TV and print ads for cigarettes and I was practically marinated in exhaled nicotine until I was 17 and went to college, I never took up the habit, save for an almost obligatory phase in freshman year of high school where I daringly snagged packs of Kool menthols from the ‘rents’ stash and smoked them in the Bagels & Bialys shop after school while I waited for my bus in a transparent effort to boost my cool meter. What’s even more amazing about my not smoking is that my parents never actually discouraged the practice. When mom and dad would leave the house, their parting words were always, “And if you’re going to take up smoking, for God’s sake wait until we get home!” Their worst fears were not that we would adopt a habit that is apparently harder to kick than heroin; no, they were afraid we’d mismanage our butts and burn the house down.

I tell these stories to anyone today and they look at me like I’m describing Martians, it’s so far away from what our society’s mindset is today.

It’s definitely a far cry from my children’s education. In fact, my kids have been bombarded with anti-smoking literature to the point where, when I found my daughter’s school uniform skirt had a melted kind of hole in it (because the fibers in a Catholic school uniforms aren’t grown; they must be mined) and I asked if she’d been smoking, she was genuinely horrified that I would suggest such a thing. (In retrospect, I should have asked her if she’d been smoking pot. Not that I have evidence that she was, but just to see her reaction to *that.*)

And it’s a good thing that kids are being cautioned not to smoke. Smoking is a really expensive, smelly habit at best, that serves no apparent purpose as far as I can see other than to calm the smoker down when they get anxious about wanting a cigarette. I’m not even going to go into the health ramifications of smoking…it’s astounding to me that my parents will carefully explain to me that no one knew that smoking could be a problem until something like the sixties or so.  This just blows my mind: I cannot comprehend looking into that sludge in an ashtray and concluding anything other than “that crap is glued all over to the insides of my lungs, and that has to be a bad thing.” I mean, even in the ignorant thirties everyone intuitively knew that putting your mouth on a car tailpipe was a bad idea; is this so far a leap of intuition?

It’s also safe to say that, since my parents have been smoking now for about seventy years (and that’s 7-0, as in seven decades, as in ‘since they were about ten,’) my mother smoked while she was pregnant with me and my four siblings, to the extent that she could afford to.

In this day and age, that last phrase causes great horror and shock, with a tone and timbre to the voice that I would usually reserve for a sentence that replaced the word ‘smoked’ with the phrase ‘shot up heroin’ or ‘turned tricks for extra money.’

I have had to restrain my friends from accosting passing smoking pregnant women (strangers!), because I wasn’t sure whether my friends’ fury could be contained from turning into a streetside brawl. (I’m pretty sure that slugging it out with a pregnant woman is bad, on its face.)

And that is precisely what’s wrong here.

Smoking every day throughout a pregnancy is not the same thing as drinking every day throughout a pregnancy. (Which makes it a good thing my parents couldn’t afford booze when mom was having us kids; I’m reasonably sure that the steadily-mounting pile of kids would make anesthetizing oneself with Jim Beam look like a fabulous idea.)

No, smoking’s not a good thing (see note about ashtray sludge and car tailpipes) and I would recommend that no one ever start the disgusting habit and, barring that, not smoke while pregnant or around children. But I stand before you, the product of a family that would have put the smokestacks of Pittsburgh to shame. I’m actually the underachiever among my siblings: one is a highly-respected physician; another one is arguably the best landscape photographer in America; another one has an ABD doctorate in her field, and yet another had two master’s degrees before he died of a illness not related to anyone’s cigarette consumption. Me? I just have one lousy degree and am sort of a little bit of a name in my field in my local market.

Today’s doomsayers would have me believe that my parents guaranteed me a lifetime of lower IQ and asthma-related illnesses, and that guarantee has fallen woefully short of its mark. Statistically, pregnant smoking is a bad thing to do; but it’s not an absolute, “every time” killer, either.

So I know these things:

1. Smoking while you’re pregnant is a bad to do, but it’s not the worst thing.

2. If we treat pregnant smoking the way we treat pregnant heroin addiction, say, we lose credibility and an ability to reserve our energy for prioritizing what needs attending to.

3. No one has ever changed anyone’s behavior by vilifying them. Or if they have, I would suggest to you that it’s not the best or more lasting way to accomplish behavior change.

4. We have to be very careful about what we start dictating regarding a pregnant woman’s behavior, especially through suggested laws like criminalizing smoking. This is a slippery slope, folks, that could wind up with a pregnant woman’s (or even a fertile woman’s) life being legislated to the nines, all for the sake of the fetus. Handmaid’s Tale anyone?

5. Given number 4, a person who is ideologically pro-choice might have a difficult time sliding all the way down into smacking a smoking pregnant woman. If you try to tell me that it’s a) okay to abort a baby should you want to but b) not okay to smoke during the pregnancy you choose to continue (because the baby has a right to good health), then you’re telling me that only the fetus you want has rights.

And finally, 6: One thing that at least one reader might say is, “Well, Elizabeth, if you ever lost a loved one to evil smoking you might feel otherwise.” I will grant you: that hasn’t happened to me. My parents’ DNA is apparently made out of some sort of bionic Teflon and they have suffered no, and I mean, no ill effects from their wanton ways.

Would I feel differently if one of them had died too young because of cigarettes? Maybe.

But those same parents taught me that I am the only one responsible for the results of my choices, and I must live (or die) with those results. If my parents do ultimately keel over prematurely (if you can even use that word when describing the death of an eighty year old) from the effects of their wanton ways, then I won’t hate cigarettes.

I’ll be a little ticked at them, though, for choosing a habit that took them away from me too soon.