Having never been a committed smoker, I’ve never been faced with the challenge of giving up.

Being the square sister of the family, it was my younger siblings who always seemed to be in trouble for being caught smoking around the back of the bike sheds whilst I ferreted away on chemistry homework and piano practice.

Being a student in the 90’s when my eyes were opened to some of the less squeaky clean past times; cigarette marketing was rather more flagrant than it is now.

Long before the smoking ban was even dreamt up, when a night out meant de-fuming your clothes for the next 24 hours and where there was enough passive smoking in most student bars on a Friday night that even non-smokers would inhale the equivalent of at least 10 cigarettes .

Regularly the student hot spots would attract the busty Marlboro girls.

Dressed head to toe in red they were paid to quite literally push free cigarettes on anyone who would take them- and so playing into the hands of the Marlboro marketing department, this lead neatly onto my first spluttering attempt at smoking.

Far from looking sophisticated, I thankfully never discovered what the pleasure can possibly be from inhaling toxic smoke that accumulates as tar on the inside of one of the most delicate organs in the body.

I feel for anyone who is faced with the challenge of quitting the smoking habit.

It can’t be easy weaning yourself off a chemical addiction, but surely there can be no greater motivation than being pregnant and avoiding the well documented dangers to your own unborn flesh and blood?

For years we’ve known that smoking in pregnancy leads to low birth weight babies at much higher risk of health issues; there can’t be a mother-to-be in the world who would wish this on their baby.

A recent study involving 612 pregnant smokers, published in the British Medical Journal, showed that motivating pregnant Mothers to quit by giving them £400 of shopping vouchers proved to be 8 times more successful than counselling alone.

Apparently for many of those taking part, the health of their unborn child is just not enough of an incentive. In the UK around 5,000 babies die as a result of smoking in pregnancy and it costs the NHS an estimated £87 million a year. A shocking statistic.

I can see the financial sense in this study, £400 is a relatively small price to pay if it saves both the health of the mother and baby and the potential cost in the future, but where does it stop?

Increasingly we seem to be a society becoming less willing to take ownership for our actions, where everything that happens is someone else’s responsibility.

To many people the drive of the NHS to become ‘patient- centred’ has somehow become misconstrued to mean the right to a GP consultation at 3am and a choice of having your hip operation done in hospital with the biggest car park.

Bribing mother’s to do the decent thing and protect their own children can never be the way forward.

Before we know it, taxpayers will be rewarding parents who brush their children’s teeth and remember to take them to school.

Being a parent means accepting a life of sacrifice. If shopping vouchers are what’s needed to get Mothers over the first hurdle, the future looks bleak for the poor children born to them.

Those Marlboro girls have a lot to answer for.

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