there was a recent thread about the details of the mommy end of the Ambilical cord… that made me Q the Baby End… (and further pointing out my level of Biological Ignorance (among other subjects I barely passed in H.S.)) …
Wut would happen if you didn’t tie off the baby end after cutting it? Would the baby bleed to death? And how did our Prehistoric Ancestors do it? (or very early recorded history for that matter)
And what about other animals? Like Monkeys… surely they don’t know how to make knots do they? They are supposed to be really close to us on the evelutionary chart… so i’m assuming thier birthing process is basicly identical (granted I have little to base that assumption on… but oh well…)
So could someone whack me on the hand w/ the ruler and tell me (besides that I should’ve actually opened my books in school) what the answer is…
I’m no anthropologist, but way back whenever, when Ogg’s wife Ugg gave birth to an Ugglet, they probably left the umbilicus and placenta attached until nature took care of matters and it all fell off the baby.
If not, and they cut/bit it off too early and the baby bled out, (the medical term for this that I just adore is exsanguinated) it’d be a reasonable assumption that the ensuing conversation would be “Ogg not do that again”
If you cut the cord without clamping it as soon as the baby is born, yes, the baby would bleed out.
However, IIRC, by the time the placenta comes out, blood has stopped flowing through the cord and the vessels have collapsed so blood loss would probably be much less.
My cats have eaten the placenta and chewed the cord shortly after the placenta came out - all the kittens were fine.
In horses (which often give birth unattended, even if you try to be there), the cord will usually stay intact until either the mare or foal gets up. By then, the placenta has generally started it detaching phase, and blood is no longer flowing thru the cord. When they stand up, the cord will break. Some blood will come out, but not much – always looked to me like only the blood in the cord itself; it didn’t drain all the blood out of the foal, obviously. Just like a small cut won’t. I imagine the normal blood coagulation process starts, just like with any wound.
When we were there before the cord broke, we would take it near the mare, squeeze it in our fingers, and run them up the cord to the foal (pushing all the blood into the foal), then clamp it and cut it off a few inches from the foal’s navel. Then put disinfectant on the cord, to discourage any infection. I don’t know if the pushing the blood into the foal really helped, but we thought the foal needed it more than the much larger mare.
Obviously, mammelian animals have been giving birth for centuries without doctors, midwifes, or vets in attendance. And most of them have survived fine. Any species which continues to bleed from the umbilical cord would not have lasted long.
There is a school of thought that says, it’s bad for babies to clamp the cord immediately, before the cord stops pulsing, because the blood in the placenta is the baby’s blood, and belongs inside the baby - not clamped away from it instantly the second the baby is out of mom. If you wait for the ductus arteriosis to close (which is naturally will begin to do, as soon as baby takes some independent breaths (See this great explantion), then blood isn’t going to be circulating through the umbilical veins and arteries, and no, exsanguination will not take place. Clamping the cord before baby is breathing independently and well, and has ‘pinked up’, seems like a very bad idea to me unless the placenta has already detached from the uterine wall.
That said, with other mammalian births I have seen, the mother either bites the cord within a few minutes, or it tears apart when the (calf, foal or lamb) staggers to its feet, or the mother does. I have never seen a problem with bleeding. I can imagine a problem if the ductus arteriosis doesn’t close correctly (what is known as 'persistent fetal circulation), but this is probably a rare event because any genetic tendency to such a failure would be self-eliminating.
Just thought I’d mention that when a blood vessel is stretched/torn/chewed there is a greater tendency for hemostasis (clotting) to occur than if the same vessel were cut with a blade. This is due to the increase in surface area for the plateletes to act upon as well as a “snapping” type effect from the elastic wall of the vessel being stretched prior to tearing.
For instance, if you were to slice off a hand with a perfectly sharp blade there would be more bleeding than if the same hand were torn off by Siegfreid’s tiger.