Physiologists agree that smoking does no more harm to a woman than to a man, if harm there be. According to many investigators, the only circumstances under which a woman should not smoke are while she has anesthetic gas in her lungs (she might explode), and while she produces milk for her baby. Milk drains from the blood of a smoking mother those smoke ingredients which please her, but may not agree with her nursling.
Might smoking disagree with a baby before it was born? asked Antioch College's Drs. Lester Warren Sontag and Robert F. Wallace. While pregnant women who had smoked for years and one who never before had smoked, puffed cigarets, the Antioch doctors held stethoscopes to the mothers' abdomens, listened to the beatings of the baby hearts. Smoking promptly sent the fetal heart beats up from 144 to 149 beats a minute. This made the Antioch doctors conclude: "It is not improbable that maternal smoking during pregnancy may have permanently harmful effects upon the child."