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Yes, it's wrong but I smoked through BOTH of my pregnancies

When the Mail ran a story last week about feckless single mother Charlie Wilcox smoking 3,500 cigarettes during her pregnancy, reaction online was swift and vitriolic.

Readers branded her ‘selfish’ and ‘cruel’. Some said her child should be placed in care after the 20-year-old from Kent even tried to claim her addiction had been good for her daughter Lilly.

Just like Mail readers, I cringed when I looked at the pictures of Charlie defiantly posing with a cigarette in her hand as it rested gently on her full-term bump. But I was cringing for a different reason — I smoked during both my pregnancies.

Unlike Charlie, I’m not impoverished or ill-educated and neither was I barely out of my teens when I started my family. I was in my late 30s, a graduate, happily married. I cannot even pretend I was unaware of the health risks that smoking posed to my unborn child. The one thing I had in common with Charlie Wilcox is that we were both addicted to smoking.

Kate Garraway, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Kate Moss have all been caught smoking during pregnancy and had their unhealthy habit branded tantamount to child abuse as a result. More recently, seven-months pregnant actress Hannah Waterman was caught on camera having a crafty drag and incurred the nation’s wrath in the process.

Like many women I started smoking at university. I thought it gave me a cool and edgy image and that I could stop any time I wanted. But I couldn’t.

Unlike cocky Charlie, when I smoked during pregnancy I felt guilty, humiliated and distressed. I puffed my way through five a day on average while pregnant with both my boys. Sometimes fewer. Sometimes more. It wasn’t done in a defiant, look-at-me way but in a skulking, ‘please God don’t let anybody see me’ way.

I was lucky, as a freelance journalist, to work mainly from home. If I hadn’t, then no doubt I’d have done the same as Hannah Waterman and smoked in a quiet, private space like my car.

The minute we find out we’re expecting, we are told to stop and I believed my body would help me. But it didn’t happen. I still wanted to smoke. My body would no longer tolerate my two other great loves. Coffee made me vomit and cheese made me queasy  — but I craved cigarettes.

I clawed my way to the three-month mark, cheating every three days or so by raiding my husband’s supply. He gallantly offered to quit with me and to this day smokes only when he has a drink.

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