Hi, Couple of things to say. First, at no point did Tom intimate, write or otherwise, that this woman was in the second stage of labour. If she was, he would hardly have been having conversations with her about anything apart from the impending birth of her baby! Secondly, there IS a lot of research out there that documents quite clearly the impact of smoking when pregnant on the fetus and the imapct of smoking around newborns and it all basically shows that smoking equals increased morbidity and mortality. As a midwife, it annoys me when people who are not the experts in pregnancy talk about things as if they know all about it when in actual fact it is easy to become out of date with research in obstetrics and neonatology. I also generally don't expect GPs to know all the up to date research in this area because one can't know everything about everything and I would expect a GP to refer to a midwife for pregnancy related queries. Otherwise you get things like GPs doing internal examinations to confirm pregnancy, telling women they can't have a homebirth as they have size 4 feet, and weighing people routinely for no clinical reason.