I was reading through some old issues of the Chicago Tribune for crimes and I found a lot of infanticide cases, listed as murder. The actual charge was "death by failure to tie an umbilical cord.
Now all but two of these (at least of those I read, and there were a lot of them) were “dumped” babies. Meaning they were left in vacant lots, privy boxes, barns etc.
My question is, did these babies really bleed to death or was this just the standard way of putting it? I must add, the time frame was BEFORE 1900.
Certainly I could see how an infant could die if the cord isn’t tied off, but I couldn’t seem to find any other reason as listed, like exposure or starvation etc.
I don’t see how failing to tie the umbilical cord would be fatal. Apes don’t tie the cord and I don’t imagine that the humans of 100,000 years ago would have done it.
A baby does not die from not having the cord clamped/cut/tied if the baby is otherwise healthy and the placenta is properly formed. Google “lotus birth” and “delayed clamping” for some really interesting treatments of this idea. I warn that some of the pictures you find of a “lotus birth”, in which the cord is never clamped, cut, or otherwise messed with, are rather gruesome.
Right, but that’s not the question. The question is if the baby can die from a failure to tie the cord prior to cutting, and I have no idea what the answer is to that. In the “lotus births” you are talking about, the cord is not cut, so it doesn’t need to be tied.
I found a forum for women who promote unassisted childbirth and they seem to indicate that if the placenta is born as well, there is no issue. BUT if the cord is cut before the placenta is born it can lead to the baby bleeding and other complications.
But I was wondering if the term “Death By Failure To Tie Umbilical Cord” couldn’t be used as a euphemism for something else, as these cases were all around 1900 and before.
I just double checked this issue with my wife, the neonatologist.
The arteries and vein in the umbilical cord will, on their own, clamp down in a process that takes several minutes after birth. At the time of birth, the cord pulsates visibly due to the flow of blood through it, but this pulsation gradually slows down and stops after five or more minutes. Once the cord has stopped pulsating, it can be cut with a sharp instrument and will not bleed much if at all, even without clamping. The normal physiological process of the artery and veins going into spasm is promoted by mechanical trauma to the cord: so chewing through the cord or smashing it with a rock or tearing it apart in some other way produces more and faster spasm than sharp cutting.
However, there is still a window of several minutes immediately following the birth, during which the cord is still pulsatile, when sharp division of the cord without first clamping it on the ‘baby’ side of the cut will result in significant blood loss from the baby; certainly enough to require transfusion. Furthermore, if the cord is cut a second time closer to the baby the bleeding can start again. It’s certainly possible that in the absence of medical intervention the blood loss could be fatal, especially if one was trying to use this as a form of infanticide.
Tying the umbilical cord is not necessary in the absence of other intervention. Tying the cord is not necessary if you wait to cut it until it has stopped pulsating. Tying of the cord, at least on the baby side is necessary if you cut the cord with something sharp before it has stopped pulsating.