THE IMPACT OF MATERNAL SMOKING HABITS DURING PREGNANCY ON BIRTH WEIGHT

Abstract

Birth weight is an important indicator in assessing the health of both the baby and the mother during pregnancy. One behavioral factor suspected of influencing adverse birth outcomes is maternal smoking during pregnancy. This study aims to modify the impact of maternal smoking on birth weight using an Impact Evaluation approach using the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method. The data used consisted of 4,642 observations of mothers and babies, with birth weight as the primary outcome variable and maternal smoking status during pregnancy as the treatment variable. The analysis showed that before the matching process, there was a difference in average birth weight of 275 grams between babies born to mothers who smoked and those who did not smoke. After adjusting for maternal characteristics using the PSM method, this difference remained significant, with an Average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATT) value of approximately -197 grams. Other estimates using the ATET and nearest neighbor approaches also showed that babies born to mothers who smoked had birth weights approximately 200–226 grams lower than babies born to mothers who did not smoke. These findings indicate that smoking during pregnancy has a significant negative impact on birth weight, even after controlling for various maternal social and demographic characteristics. Therefore, efforts to control smoking behavior in pregnant women are crucial as part of public health policies to improve infant health from birth.