Birth defects could be expected because of the smoking of pregnant mother. If the mother smokes even as pregnant, the chances of the baby dying will be much more positive during the first year of life. a number of birth defects have been linked to the mother's smoking. Birth defects that may be greater than before due to  the smoking of the mother include: cleft lip, cleft palate, clubfoot, limb defects, some types of heart defects, gastroschisis (an opening in the muscles of the abdomen that allows the intestines to appear outside the body), and imperforate anus (there is no opening from the intestines to the outside of the body to allow stool or gas to be passed).

According to Sadia Malik, M.B.B.S, M.P.H. “The heart’s basic structures develop very early in pregnancy, before many women realize they are pregnant. Thus, even if a woman quits smoking at six weeks or later, her fetus will still have been exposed to the harmful effects of cigarette smoking during cardiac development.”

According to the authors of the study on “motherly smoking and oral–facial clefts” talked about the many problems that a mother’s smoking causes for her newborn child. They suggested that their findings about oral–facial clefts be included in future anti–smoking campaigns, at the length of with in sequence about the additional health problems that tobacco causes for families.

Another study based on 190 infants born with oral cleft and 248 controls coordinated with these cases by sex, date of birth, and place. If a woman smoked for the duration of the first trimester of her pregnancy, her baby was 1.9 times probable to be born with a cleft lip by means of without a cleft palate than the baby of a nonsmoking mother. That number enlarged to 2.3 times for a cleft palate alone. There was some proof that a pregnant woman’s contact to secondhand smoke also effected whether her baby had a cleft lip or palate, but the statistics were not sufficient to substantiate that conclusion.