If a stone age woman didn't bite off the umbilical cord would her baby die?

[irishgirl]

I understand- we treat everyone too. Where I worked we didn’t even bother testing the alleged dad unless mum’s antibody screen was positive and it became necessary to know whether baby could be positive or not (and if mum wasn’t sure if “dadddy” was really daddy, we’d do an amnio and test the baby anyway and tell “daddy” we needed to know for sure).

I was just saying that the third trimester Anti-D is not to protect this baby from a previously unmentioned pregnancy but to protect your future kids from possible silent immunisation during this particular pregnancy. Even if it is your first pregnancy, your post delivery Anti-D might not be sufficient to mop up the antibodies and prevent trouble next time round if you’ve been having silent bleeds in your second and third trimester.

If you are Rh-ve and have a positive antibody screen, it means that you have been in contact with Rh+ve blood, either from a blood transfusion or a previous pregnancy. If the antibody screen is positive any Rheus positive baby you carry will be at risk- all the RhoGAM in the world will achieve nothing.

Sorry, big hijack.
I think we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet with slightly different words anyway.

[Attack_from_the_3rd_dimension]

@irishgirl

Sorry, big hijack.
I think we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet with slightly different words anyway.

Considering that your comment is relevant, and my contribution to date has been a narrative regarding the tribulations inherent in keeping my placenta, I don’t think you’re the one who needs to worry about hijacking.

sorry about hijacking with my story above.

[MrDibble]

Back to the OP - why would the woman/helper have to bite anything? That’s what flint knives are for! That’s why they call it the Stone Age, after all

[enipla]

Many moons ago (‘bout 20 years) I took an advanced first aid class. One part was cutting the cord of a placenta.

OkyDok. Placenta in question was kept in the teachers HOME freezer/fridge.

Well, really, it’s no different than freezing cow, pork or chicken parts I suppose. But it did squeak me out a bit.

‘What’s for dinner’ in that house would take on a whole different meaning.

[Zsofia]

@WhyNot

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.

Hey, I don’t mind the tree. I’d have Other Plans when you asked me over for placenta stew, but, hey, whatever. But what the hell does your mother say when you hand her a basket with baby and placenta in it?

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@enipla

…‘What’s for dinner’ in that house would take on a whole different meaning.

SNL, in its very early days, had a fake ad for “Placenta Helper.” :: shudder ::

[WhyNot]

@Zsofia

Hey, I don’t mind the tree. I’d have Other Plans when you asked me over for placenta stew, but, hey, whatever. But what the hell does your mother say when you hand her a basket with baby and placenta in it?

My mother? She’d say, “What the hell is this?” and I’d say, “Some weirdo’s baby with the placenta still attached,” and we’d make small talk 'till we could hightail it out of there and go to Applebees for the placenta free menu.

I may be a hippie, but I ain’t a weirdo*!

*Quick: how far out do you think the person a Lotus Birth follower calls “weird” must be? It’s weirdos all the way down.

[brujaja]

Hey, as long as we’ve got you all here… When I gave birth to my son fifteen years ago, there was a flap because of some kind of test; I believe it was a “rattlesnake antivenom” test or something like that. (WTF?) As a result, they had to prick his little scalp inside the birth canal to test his blood before they would let me give birth. Anybody know what that was all about?

[WhyNot]

@brujaja

Hey, as long as we’ve got you all here… When I gave birth to my son fifteen years ago, there was a flap because of some kind of test; I believe it was a “rattlesnake antivenom” test or something like that. (WTF?) As a result, they had to prick his little scalp inside the birth canal to test his blood before they would let me give birth. Anybody know what that was all about?

THIS POST IS FULL OF WAGS*. I’m just marking time until **irishgirl **gets in, and then we can all laugh at how wrong I am.

Was there any reason to suspect he might have had liver damage or other bleeding risks? An INR is a common measurement of how well your blood is able to clot. Perhaps if they thought he might have some clotting issues, they wanted to check and decide if a c-section might be safer.

It’s also possible that the doctor you delivered with was checking to see if a newborn shot of Vitamin K was advisable. Most docs at that time were doing it on all newborns, maybe, possibly, your doctor wanted to take things on an individual basis. I’m not sure why that would have to be done while the baby was still inside the birth canal, though.

*“Wild-Assed-Guesses”

[drachillix]

@WhyNot

THIS POST IS FULL OF WAGS*. I’m just marking time until **irishgirl **gets in, and then we can all laugh at how wrong I am.

*“Wild-Assed-Guesses”

Or there is always another option

Paging Cyn to GQ.

[Zsofia]

@WhyNot

My mother? She’d say, “What the hell is this?” and I’d say, “Some weirdo’s baby with the placenta still attached,” and we’d make small talk 'till we could hightail it out of there and go to Applebees for the placenta free menu.

I may be a hippie, but I ain’t a weirdo*!

*Quick: how far out do you think the person a Lotus Birth follower calls “weird” must be? It’s weirdos all the way down.

Well, I meant anybody’s mom - one assumes, perhaps incorrectly, that the kind of people who carry the placenta around in a basket probably have mothers who are high powered attorneys who gave birth the “knock me out and wake me up when there’s a baby” way. I guess there must somewhere exist people who grew up on the commune and remain there, but in my experience there’s a generational pendulum at work.

And if I gave my mom a placenta in a basket she’d say “What the hell is wrong with you? This is strange. Your grandmother had your father in a cotton field and she didn’t haul all the parts around with her. Are you just waiting until right before trash pickup to throw it out?”

Thinking about the storage problems inherent in a family where everybody saves everybody’s placenta for the funeral is hilarious. If you go out of the country for a while do you take it with you or do you put it in the safety deposit box? What if you forget to bury Grandma’s with her? (You probably pretend like you did and then throw it out right before they come and pick up the trash, just like I clean out my fridge.)

[GargoyleWB]

It falls off eventually? Darn.

On reading the thread title, I immediately envisioned hordes of rampaging berserker cavemen tribes, whirling their dried placental flails about their heads, mightily walloping their foes. Cutting off the cord of one of your foes placenta cudgels to use against them would earn you “counting coup” prestige within your tribe.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

I think I saw a movie about that.

[burundi]

@Zsofia

Well, I meant anybody’s mom - one assumes, perhaps incorrectly, that the kind of people who carry the placenta around in a basket probably have mothers who are high powered attorneys who gave birth the “knock me out and wake me up when there’s a baby” way. I guess there must somewhere exist people who grew up on the commune and remain there, but in my experience there’s a generational pendulum at work.

And if I gave my mom a placenta in a basket she’d say “What the hell is wrong with you? This is strange. Your grandmother had your father in a cotton field and she didn’t haul all the parts around with her. Are you just waiting until right before trash pickup to throw it out?”

Your mother and mine sound awfully similar. My mom looks forward to having grandchildren, but the idea of witnessing a birth, much less holding a placenta? If she could have, she would have been absent from her own kids’ births.

[Zsofia]

I mentioned to my mom that I’d been reading some about natural childbirth and she laughed until I thought she was going to throw up.

She did breastfeed me, though, and it wasn’t as expected then as it is now.

She’d totally throw the placenta out when I wasn’t looking. “Mom, what did you do with my lotus?”

[maggenpye]

@enipla

Many moons ago (‘bout 20 years) I took an advanced first aid class. One part was cutting the cord of a placenta.

OkyDok. Placenta in question was kept in the teachers HOME freezer/fridge.

Well, really, it’s no different than freezing cow, pork or chicken parts I suppose. But it did squeak me out a bit.

‘What’s for dinner’ in that house would take on a whole different meaning.

I’ve mentioned it before - so, short version.

Keeping the placenta in the freezer can result in a tree being planted over the frozen fish bait. Luckily discovered *before *the next fishing trip.

[Oslo_Ostragoth]

Having witnessed hundreds of animal births, I have to ask why any action at all is necessary in human births.

[Zsofia]

@maggenpye

I’ve mentioned it before - so, short version.

Keeping the placenta in the freezer can result in a tree being planted over the frozen fish bait. Luckily discovered *before *the next fishing trip.

Why luckily? Think what you could have caught!

[WhyNot]

@Oslo Ostragoth

Having witnessed hundreds of animal births, I have to ask why any action at all is necessary in human births.

Well, we have these ridiculously large heads, see, even as babies. And we insist on this walking upright thing, which means our pelvises aren’t all they could be, and the hole the head has to pass through is at right angles to the birth canal. (Yeah, “intelligent design,” my ass!) So first we tried* having our babies sooner, before they’re really fully cooked. Works for the kangaroos, right? So instead of a nice year long gestation, we have 'em around 40 weeks. Sure, the babies are completely helpless at that point, but if we pair bond to our mates, someone can go find the food while the other person holds the baby for 6 months. Hmm…maybe pouches would be a good idea…

That still wasn’t quite enough, so next we tried collapsing the skull of the infant in the birth canal - the bones slide one over the other to make the huge thing a little smaller. That seems to do the trick, most of the time, but it still takes time to encourage bones to move like that. And there’s still that weird right angle to get around. Babies still get stuck on pelvic bones distressingly often. Sometimes they can be moved by changing the position Mom’s laboring in, but sometimes they won’t budge, and you need progressively greater interventions to get them out before Mom’s too exhausted to push anymore.

And then there’s the social and mental handicaps. We’ve decided to hide away our real women giving birth and replace that experience with overly dramatic actors shrieking on television and going from first (excruciating) contraction to delivering a 5 month old in about 14 minutes flat. For many women, the first real birth they ever witness is the one where the child is coming out of them. So we’re terrified, which never does good things for relaxation of large muscle groups, and we’re ignorant, which is rarely useful when it comes to doing new things.

And we *think *all the time, which means “instinct” which, as far as we know, guides all other animals through this process, doesn’t work so well with humans. So because of the ignorance thing and the thinking thing, we want guidance and assistance.

We don’t deliver like other animals because we’re not like other animals, in this particular instance. Some of that is through biology (some breeds of bulldog require intervention at birth for some of the same reasons we do) and some through social conditioning and fear.

Do I think (most) women would be (mostly) better off if we lessened the default level of intervention? Absolutely, no question. But I wouldn’t want to give birth totally alone, either.

*speaking metaphorically, of course. And possibly out of order.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Well said, WhyNot. Well said.