The Huffington Post article is about how a pregnant mother’s smoking habits can possibly have detrimental effects on the fetus. In a study pictures of 20 fetuses were taken from weeks 24 to 36. Four of the pregnant mothers smoked 14 cigarettes a day and the other 16 were non-smokers. The study was performed by Dr. Nadja Reissland of England’s Durham University and it showed that a fetus whose mother chose to smoke during her pregnancy touches his or her face a lot more than a fetus’s whose mother did not smoke during her pregnancy. A fetus touching its face is common, but only during it early periods and they eventually gain proper motor function and the face touching stops. Due to the significant differences in rate of how often the smoker fetus touches its face in comparison to that of the non smoker, the conductors of the research hypothesize that the high concentrations of nicotine introduced to the fetus causes it to have central nervous system problems thus the extended face touching.
The article does not in any way say that the the possible harmful outcomes are fact. They are simply following the scientific method and using scientific data derived from a controlled study to come to a decision. They do not state that their
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They only state that it can cause damage to a certain part of the body and in hopes that pictures of the fetuses will cause the mothers to stop smoking. They do use a dramatic word such as scary in the title, but it is justified considering the possible damage can be towards the Central Nervous System. The only flaw in this experiment that would make someone hesitate to believe the data would be that the experiment only had 20 subjects. It does not follow the usual method for validation of data which is repetition and a larger subject group to have more generalized