As I was reclining in my chair mindlessly reading E-mail, I started fiddling around with my belly-button. Strange, I know, but hey, do what ya gotta do. It lead me to some serious wondering: What would happen if I cut the little nub on what was once my umbilical cord? I assume it has shruken up to nothing now, but assume for a moment it hasn’t. If I ate something would it come out of my belly-button? How about drink? Where exactly does this tube of yesteryear lead to anyway?
I don’t think it leads anywhere. The umbilical “cord” was mainly a bundle of blood vessels, not a connection to your stomach. You can get hernias in that area, but, I assume it’s just because it’s a relatively weak spot in the abdominal wall.
eeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwww! Does that mean you have an ‘outie’?
Contrary to popular belief, the umbilical cord does not supply munchies to the fetus, just nutrient rich blood. After you’re outside for a while it shrivels ub into a bunch of scar tissue. If you poke a hole in it, don’t be surprised if you start squirting blood from your belly button 
Blood? haha…lots of people get rings there.
Related question: isn’t there a one-word scientific term for “belly-button”? I don’t like the expression “belly-button”, it has always seemed childish to me, like saying tummy instead of stomache. In french the word is “nombril”.
navel or umbilicus
Try ‘navel’.
what would happen if the cord was not cut, would we have the entire afterbirth just hanging around?
I would expect it to simply do the same thing as sunburnt skin. Peel, flake, erode, etc.
Thank you, bibliophage and Badtz Maru. I feel like such an idiot! :o I was thinking and thinking and had a word at the tip of my tongue, but couldn’t spit it out. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something wrong with my brain.
Coming back to my thread late, I’ve been offline all day.
So, the cord only serves nutrients and whatnot and is absorbed right inside the wall of the stomach of the fetus? Remember, I’m assuming that it hasn’t deteriorated since birth. What if I snip it and look inside? Where’s it going?
The consensus here, outside of calling a belly-button a navel, is that leads nowhere?
Enright, it’s and ‘inny’ but you can still feel the ‘nub’ if you rub it. Go eewwww yourself.
If you play with your belly-buckle too much, your ass will fall off.
Of course. Everyone knows that. But do nutrients then flow out of the newly created vacuum?
Bad assumption. 
The umbilical arteries and vein shrivel up after birth to become a tendon of sorts, connecting the liver (because the umbilical vein connects to the portal blood system) and the navel. The tendon is completely disconnected from the cardiovascular system, and was never connected to the alimentary canal.
If you were to snip and look inside, you wouldn’t see much of anything; the inside of a tendon is extremely boring. Plus you’d have to look through the blood, which would come from your skin.
LL
One of my first posts was about BB lint.
LazarusLong42: My assumptions were based on the previous answers to the thread, not on what I believed, it was a generalization of the above.
People seem to be missing a key point from my original post, that is, if there were no disintergration that has taken place since birth, where is this veign leading to now?
Is it leading to the liver? The heart? Or nothing in particular?
That’s what I had been sitting here wondering when I originally posted. If it’s supplying blood to the fetus, then does it go throught the fetus’ heart? If it’s supplying nutrients, does it pass through the fetus’ liver too? Are there a number of ‘lines’ that extend into the fetus to each main organ? Maybe it’s two questions here and not one, but both are intriguing me now.
–I have to leave for the day and can’t check back until tonight, so don’t think that I abandoned the thread by not posting.
Thanks
The umbilical vein comes from the hepatic portal vein system, which brings “dirty” blood through the liver to be cleansed of things that the liver can break down. The two umbilical arteries flow into the internal iliac arteries, which are in fact in your groin/thigh area.
LL
Fetal circulation uses special shunts to bypass the fetal lungs because they do not funtion until after birth. They don’t need to because the blood is oxygenated by the mother’s lungs and then circulated thru the placenta from which the umbilical cord originates and is connected to the baby at the umbilicus. Once baby is breathing he doesn’t need mother’s oxygen rich blood at that point. It is the act of baby breathing that starts the transition from fetal circulation to postnatal circulation.
So if you poked your belly button until it bled it probably wouldn’t kill you.