Smoking Cessation for Low-Income Pregnant Women

Participants of CBC were educated about the effects of smoking on their personal health and their pregnancy during session 1 (45 minutes counseling), and were encouraged to explore their risk perceptions and emotions, for themselves and their unborn child. During session 2, the 15-minute counseling segment highlighted the cognitive and emotion barriers undermining the participant's motivation to quit and the self-regulatory techniques for resisting personal smoking triggers. Session 3 (45 minutes counseling) involved reviewing smoking status and smoking history over the course of the pregnancy, as well as the effects of smoking on both their health and the health of their infant. Booster session was held by phone for 15 min.

"For ethical considerations, and consistent with practice guidelines for treating tobacco addiction (Fiore et al., 2000) which mandates that every pregnant smoker be offered smoking cessation treatment, the control group has been designed to be comparable to the current best practice guidelines for smoking cessation treatments. This condition, devised from a review of the current literature, will include one brief (5-15 minutes) prenatal individual session (session 1) consisting of smoking cessation education and advice, on-site brochure pick up (session 2), and a second brief postpartum individual session (session 3) followed by receipt of a newsletter (session 4)."