In modern times we “cut the cord”. I assume in stone age times the mother or some helper bit it in two. Is this necessary or will the cord separate somehow if left alone?
:o - I apologize mods - Please move this to GQ
I assume it was probably cut as a matter of convenience, but even if it weren’t, it would eventually wither and fall off of its own accord. See Lotus Birth.
The tree-hugging set sells special baskets to haul the whole shebang around in.
Pfff, that’s nothing. The real hardcore ones eat it.
I’m pretty cool with all the alternative birthing practices (while not wanting to ever do them), but y’know, hey, it’s OK with me if you want to do things in a natural-er way. However, I quote wikipedia:
" Some people prefer for the child to have the placenta so that it can be buried with the child at the end of his or her life."
Are you freaking kidding me? We’re trying to move, we’ve got wedding presents we don’t use and can’t dump, my son is melting down over broken toys he finds at the park that we won’t pack up. My daughter has a designated kibble drawer in which she keeps, fluff, and bits and doolywitzes that she can’t bear to part from. My dresser is halfway full of baby teeth, and scribble pictures that nobody can throw away (well, I could, but there would be a reckoning).
And now you want me to truck around a placenta? Wait, 2 placentas, and keep track of them forever and pass them on to the kids? No, wait, it would be 4 placentas, cause I’d have mine, and god forbid, my wife’s.
Imagine the ruckus if I lost the f-ing things. And I’d store them how exactly?- in a jar with formaldehyde, or dried and pressed between the pages of a book, like a flower?
And I suppose if my parents became unwell and went into a home, I could wind up looking after them till the owners died. What the hell, I might as well make a special storage spot for them all, maybe in the garage - comics and collectibles on the right, placentas on the left. I could collect and trade them while I’m at it, I mean, really, nobody’s going to know whose placenta it really is.
Worst of all, I’d have gotten my own one from my parents, so there would have been this totally awkward scene:
Dad:" Well, Attack, you’re going off to college now, you’ve become a man"
Me: “Yup”
Dad: " Well, don’t drink sweet drinks, they’ll give you a hangover" [Dad’s actual advice]
Me: “Ok”
Mum: " And here’s your placenta" [puts jar on table]
Me: “My wha’?”
Mum: “Your placenta, we saved it for you, you can be buried with it” [Dad looks off vaguely into the middle distance]
Me: “Um … thanks?”
[Guiltily averts eyes and leaves, knowing full well that having your placenta in your dorm room is NOT cool. Later, sneakily hides placenta in attic, minutes before leaving for college]
AFAIK If the cord isn’t cut or (bitten) and tied off on the part that is attached to the infant.
I was told this while helping with a planned home birth once.
I’m sorry, I can’t read the rest of this sentence as there’s a premature period in the way.
Aw man, and I’m wearing white slacks! Frakking *hate *it when that happens! 
Zsofia, just so’s you know, even the vast majority of the tree hugging set thinks Lotus Birth is really weird. 'Though we do tend to be placenta savers, burying it and planting a tree over it is much more common. You know, so we have another tree to hug. 
AFAIK If the cord isn’t cut or (bitten) and tied off on the part that is attached to the infant it could cause problems for the infant.
I was told this while helping with a planned home birth once
And as I copied and pasted from the spell checker I did not get the whole sentence on my post.
My apologies .
This is, as far as I know, not true in most normal healthy births. The blood will stop flowing between the infant and the placenta shortly after birth, and the placenta will start to dehydrate. The attachment to the baby will, just like in a severed situation, dry out, shrink and eventually fall off, leaving a naval scar and also separating the placenta from the infant.
I can’t find any information that it’s dangerous, it’s just not how things are normally done in any mainstream culture I know of.
If the infant requires medical intervention, of course, having a cord and placenta attached could get in the care team’s way, so they’d probably want to remove it, but they wouldn’t really have to for any reason I can think of. (They might even find it easier to place an umbilical line, if needed.)
This is a strange question. I think it’s been answered pretty well, but it’s a strange question. Did the OP assume that placenta maintained anti-clotting properties once removed from the womb?
Thank you ,
I did a search and found that it can cause the infant problems if the cord were cut or clamped to soon. The mid wife helping the mother during the home birth did wait until the cord had stopped pulsing and a white place appeared before cutting and clamping the cord . When mid wife was asked the question about "what would happen if the cord was not cut “in time” she said “it could cause the infant problems .” I found no info about not cutting the cord at all in my search just now. The home birth was almost 20 years ago and I suppose at that time it was common practise ,not that it matters at this point because my info was not correct.
thank you .
Kat
You’re very welcome!
Cutting the cord too *soon is still a hotly debated issue. In my experience, most lay midwives and quite a few Certified Nurse Midwives would rather wait until the cord stops pulsing, as you describe. That signals that the baby’s blood is all back in his body and not circulating in the placenta anymore.
Doctors and CNM’s with heavy Western allopathic training are more likely to disregard the pulsing and to cut the cord sooner, considering any blood lost to the placenta to be insignificant.
My not-so-humble opinion is that, as long as there’s nothing medically wrong, you might as well give it a few minutes. I don’t like the rush of the hospital room post-birth, but I understand why it’s necessary in modern hospitals - chances are good that there are a dozen other laboring women who need attention, and the sooner we get this little guy cut, cleaned, weighed and processed, the sooner we can get to the panicky moms down the hall.
*Contrary to what most people seem to think, the baby’s blood and the mother’s blood are two completely different systems and never, in a healthy pregnancy, come into direct contact. They do NOT mix in the placenta like a mixing bowl, but stay in their own vessels and arteries, like two fine nets tangled up with one another. Nutrients and oxygen pass through the walls of the mom’s bloodstream and into the baby’s, and waste passes through the baby’s vessel walls and into the mother’s bloodstream, but the blood itself stays separate.
How does the problem with Rh+ vs Rh- arise then? (I’m not being sarcastic; I’m genuinely curious).
Rh incompatibility happens when blood vessels break, blood leaks out and the closed system becomes open. That’s why I limited my explanation to “healthy” pregnancies.
There’s a protein, called “Rh” (pronounced “Are-aitch”) on the outside of most people’s red blood cells. If your red blood cells have it, you’re called “Rh+” (“Are-aitch positive”) and if not, you’re Rh-. The problem arises when an Rh- woman is carrying an Rh+ baby.
If some of the baby’s blood gets out of the baby’s share of the blood vessels (either the ones in the baby’s body or the placenta), then it’s in the mother’s immune system territory. It recognizes it as “not-hers”, due to the proteins (Rh) on the outside of the baby’s blood cells that’s not on hers. It will then set out to destroy the invaders with Rh+ antibodies, “notice” the blood still inside the baby, and sometimes start attacking it, too.
It takes a while for this to ramp up. Usually the first baby is not at high risk, even if it bleeds a little. It takes more than a few weeks for the immune response to be a real danger. The real danger is for the next baby - the immune system retains the information that the Rh+ blood is “other” and so it can start attacking the next baby sooner, attack it longer, and can kill it before birth.
There are shots, called “RhoGAM”, which suppress this particular immune response. They’re usually given to all Rh- mothers around 27 weeks of pregnancy, and then again right after childbirth. They’re even given for a first pregnancy, 'cause you never really know if your patient has been pregnant before and miscarried or aborted a previous Rh+ baby, setting up a dangerous potential for her current pregnancy.
No worries. I kinda love teaching people about this stuff.
Canadjun- for it to be a problem the blood has to mix. All it takes is for a few mls of baby’s blood to get into mum’s circulation for rhesus problems to develop if mum is negative and baby is positive.
This can happen during pregnancy if the placenta separates, or if mum or baby suffers some trauma so that the placenta is damaged and the “fine nets” Whynot mentioned are torn, allowing the blood to mix. This is called a Placental abruption, and while major ones require urgent medical attention, one could have several minor such abruptions without ever having symptoms. That’s why Rhesus negative women get Anti-D in the third trimester, whether or not they’ve ever had pain, trauma or bleeding.
Fetal and maternal blood mixing is relatively common during labour and delivery as the placenta can be damaged by the uterine contractions during labour, which can again allow the blood to mix. Don’t forget that there are also tiny blood vessels running in the amniotic sac and when the waters break these can bleed and get mixed into mum’s circulation. During labour and delivery mum often bleeds from vaginal tears, and always bleeds from the raw surface where the placenta was attached to the wall of the uterus.
HIV positive mums are advised to have elective c-sections. This is to try and prevent the foetal and maternal blood mixing due to placental trauma (during labour), and foetal trauma during delivery. If you’ve attended a c-section you’ll know that it’s quite bloody, but there is less risk of mum and baby’s blood actually mixing than in a natural delivery, weird though that sounds.
Personally, I’m all for delayed cord clamping and cutting, but you know, I mean delayed to 30 mins, not days!
While anaemia is a risk of clamping the cord too soon, neonatal jaundice and polycythaemia are possible risks of delayed cord clamping.
Most studies of delayed cord clamping, by the way, study the differences between clamping within 1 minute, and waiting for 3 minutes. To my knowledge there are no reliable studies on the benefits versus the risks of Lotus births or delaying cord clamping by more than a few minutes.
WhyNot- most women have their blood grouped and screened for antibodies at their first antenatal appointment. This not only lets you know whether someone is Rhesus -ve, but also whether they have the antibodies present that are possibly going to cause harm in this pregnancy. In other words, we should know about that previous pregnancy, whether or not you’ve told us, long before it becomes an issue…and it will be an issue if you have the antibodies. All the Anti-D does is mop up the foetal cells beofre mum has a chance to manufacture her own antibodies. Once she has made her own Anti-D antibodies, it’s too late, once you’re immunised to Rhesus positive blood, Anti-D will not help.
The anti-D (RhoGAM) given in the third trimester (we give it at 28 and 34 weeks here) is not because our patients might have been pregnant before, but to mop up any antibodies that might have crossed over during this pregnancy during any silent “bleeds” from the placenta.
Anti-D doesn’t have to be given if you miscarry or terminate before 12 weeks, as the foetus doesn’t contain enough blood cells before this time to allow mum to become immunised.
Any Rhesus negative woman with any abdominal trauma or vaginal bleeding after 12 weeks into a pregnancy, whether the pregnancy continues or not, should have a shot of anti-D. Anyone who is Rh-ve and terminates a pregnancy after 12 weeks will automatically be given Anti-D by the clinic.
Here, every pregnant Rh- woman is given the shots, whether or not they detect any antibodies, whether or not she says she’s gotten pregnant her first time having sex, whether or not her partner is Rh+.
They don’t trust patient reporting in the face of lawsuits, was what my last midwife (CNM) told me. Or even an antibody screen, if they do one. No one ever mentioned an Rh antibody screen to me, and I am Rh-, although it may have been buried in the bloodwork and no one mentioned it. (The thing I asked specifically about was STI results, so I wouldn’t have to bother with my annual screen that year. Everything else I accepted a blanket, “Oh, it’s all fine and healthy looking.”) They treat EVERYONE, regardless. If the Blessed Virgin Mary was Rh- in an American hospital, she’d be gettin’ the RhoGAM.
Same in Canada