re: Cutting the umbilical cord

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It was emergency response training. Forgot thw whole context, but I guess assumed we didn't have clamps.

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Gotcha. If I ever have to deliver one, I'll try to remember your advice.

Did it, she swung her little foot at the scissors right as I was making the cut and got blood on her toe. For a moment, I freaked out and thought I already hurt my kid. Nurse wiped it off and all was good, lol.

They also send part of the cut cord to the lab for testing. It's kinda cool seeing the 3 blood vessels in the cord.

Doctor did it for both my boys. It's gross to me. I've seen people actually hang on to pieces of the umbilical cord and store it in a baby book....freaking gross..to each their own though

Ugh and then when their belly button dries out and turns black and you start finding crumbs of it in their diaper. ..hurl.

I've had parents get upset that the umbilical cord fell off and they couldn't find in the room

My son's fell off when I was playing with him in bed. Landed right on my bare stomach. I may have bitch yelped a bit.

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Still asked how the placenta detached, all I got was contracting.

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Here's the long, drawn out version. Skip to second paragraph to avoid the setup that you may or may not already understand:


So, before "the water breaks," the baby is basically inside a bag attached to the placenta which is both inside and attached to the uterus. The cervix is closed until late pregnancy, and that's the "gate" between the uterus and the vaginal canal. When a woman goes into labor, the cervix dilates itself essentially out of existence (10cm is quite large, considering the area we are talking about...it's ~4in) and you get, more or less, a big, common canal from the vagina to the back of the uterus. When the water breaks, it's the rupture of the "bag" holding the kid in. So the kid is then just kind of hanging out, no longer "swimming" or bathing in amniotic fluid, for (hopefully) a short amount of time. The head starts to press around the cervix which causes big contractions that stimulate the head being pushed more into the canal that causes bigger contractions- a rare instance of positive feedback. The baby comes through. The cord is attached to the baby which is also attached to the baby's side of the placenta. The placenta is truly a maternofetal organ with two distinct sides. The mom's blood never crosses over it, but runs right into it and gives oxygen to the baby's blood that also runs through it (separate systems, no mixing of blood. Crazy cool, if you think about it). So, as you can imagine, the mom's end is partially embedded into her uterus.


Assuming "normal" implantation of the placenta into the uterus, the person delivering the baby has cut the cord and handed the baby away, but there is still a cord with a clamp kind of dangling from the mother's vagina. The person delivering holds gentle pressure on the cord and massages the uterus (from the outside, through mom's belly) stimulating contractions that help the placenta to separate from the inside lining of the uterus, leaving the mother with an intact uterus with no placental parts left behind. Sometimes parts of the placenta can break off. As mentioned, the mom sends enough blood to this thing to keep the baby alive. When in tact, it doesn't bleed. If it breaks, it's basically a giant ball of vessels, and the mother can have significant bleeding. During normal delivery, though, the uterus contracts enough that it stops its own little vessels that were attached from bleeding. Once that thing comes out and a quick investigation shows that it's intact and the mother isn't bleeding, she's basically done

It's pretty amazing stuff. Forgive the relatively simplified version that I used to explain it. But yeah. Basically contractions push it out and stop the uterus from bleeding.

People that eat or encapsulate the placenta gross me out. Your thoughts on it?

I cut my son's cord whn he flunked out of college.