Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
Sep
7
Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
"The Vagina is a Very Dirty Place for a Baby!"
“The vagina is a very dirty place for a baby!”- OB to mom during the pushing phase.
There are 8 comments to this post.
ROFL!
mommymichael had this to say,
Sep 9, 2009 @ 5:22 pm (Quote)
I was having a conversation with a midwife that really made me think about something.
Birth and how we feed our babies literally helps create in them a healthy immune system by exposing them to their mothers germs.
Think about it. They are born from our vagina, right next to the rectum. And they feed from our breasts, quite literally right next to our arm pits. Two places considered high in bacteria..
Not saying I find it disgusting. In fact, I find it quite amazing.
[Reply]
Thank God that the vagina is such a “dirty” place – it gives the baby the gut flora they need for a healthy immune system (as compared to my c-section baby who has multiple food allergies partly I’m sure because she didn’t get to get all “dirty”!)
[Reply]
Nicholas Fogelson had this to say,
Aug 25, 2010 @ 7:50 am (Quote)
One of those times where the use of medical slang leads to misunderstanding.
‘dirty’ means very contaminated with bacteria in medical slang. In that meaning, the vagina is indeed one of the dirtiest places in the body.
[Reply]
Jamie Reply:
November 8th, 2010 at 9:48 am (Quote)
Yet again, Dr. Nick — why do you put all responsibility on the lay person, for misinterpreting the word, and not the medical professional, for using it with such indiscretion and poor timing?
What *I* hear here, as both a lay person and someone with the perspective of having pushed out two babies, is ‘we need to get this baby out of your filthy vagina quickly.’
In my own experience, I took it upon myself, on overhearing a comment from one nurse to another while *I* was in the 2nd stage, to push as hard as I could out of fear for my baby. It resulted in a 3rd degree tear. This carelessness has consequences, but neither of the nurses were required to sit on *my* tush for the next couple of months.
And another angle explores the context. As pointed out by another poster, the bacteria in the vagina is, for the most part, beneficial to the baby. Read the OB’s words again. Is this possibility remotely suggested?
[Reply]
A heavy bacterial population is natural to a healthy vagina; one that was free of bacteria would be unhealthy. “Contaminated” is not an accurate term to use when discussing a body part’s natural flora, any more than “dirty”.
(“Dirty” is, of course, not only technically inaccurate, but degrading and insulting in this context. I’m sure you didn’t mean to excuse either fault in the quoted remark.)
[Reply]
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my mom told me this too! that the baby can pick up “practically anything”
sigh.
[Reply]