Wow. It’s scary to think that these people are actually doctors.

And I guess my 15 month old is a miracle.

I’ve also heard just the opposite–in fact I just heard it again today from a midwife who should have known better. Baby will get too much blood and be jaundiced. I told her it was an “old doctor’s tale.” I leave baby’s cord intact until it’s flat and not pulsing, and I don’t have any problems with high rates of jaundice. I also don’t have anemic babies, which is what this OB seems to imply.

I wonder how the baby’s heart tells the good blood from bad blood.

Its actually the other way around. The baby gets all that good blood that is in the placenta and cord. The baby doesn’t bleed to death. With my youngest we cut her cord when she was around 30 minutes old and the placenta was born.

Comments like this convince me of what Robbie Davis Floyd wrote in Birth As An American Rite Of Passage: that obstetrics is a religion, and it has rituals it follows without knowing why they’re followed.

To whit, the baby MUST be separated from the mother in order for the hospital to show it has ownership of the baby and only generously gives its baby back to the mother. In order to do this, they MUST cut the cord early, but no one knows why. Clearly it must have something to do with the blood, right? So either the baby will get too much blood or too little blood or something. But they don’t know. They just go on blindly doing what they’ve been doing because that’s what they’ve always done, so they do it. :-b

My c-section baby, which of course involved immediate cord cutting, developed jaundice. Not severe enough to need treatment, but she was definitely yellow.

Incidentally, so did my homeborn baby with delayed cord clamping.

The “it causes jaundice” excuse doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If, for some babies, it DOES cause jaundice it definitely doesn’t cause the dangerous kind that requires treatment. It causes the kind thats nothing more than cosmetic. Some babies just get a little yellow a couple days after birth. Who cares?

Funny… we didn’t do delayed clamping w/ my first two, and both were jaundiced (esp. my first… she needed home phototherapy). We did do delayed clamping w/ my third, and she’s had NO jaundice. Coincedence? I think not!

Come on, guys…you know the doc’s always right! …which is also why I’ve been doing jumping jacks after sex to prevent pregnancy.

Umm… didn’t we learn in junior high school that blood from the baby doesn’t cross back into the placenta? Something makes me think we learned that when we learned about RH+ and RH-…

I just need to interject some misconceptions about “jaundice.” This does not really have anything to do with delayed cord clamping (DCC). What I am talking about is hyperbilirubiinemia or “jaundice.” Hyperbili is caused by the breakdown of heme containing proteins, with 75% of these proteins located in a neonates red blood cells. The theory of hyperbili with DCC is that the baby becomes polycythemic due to the excess of red blood cells circulating in their blood stream. These RBC’s eventually can breakdown and cause hyperbili. In reality there is a very low risk of hyperbili with DCC.
Just a word of caution, jaundice or hyperbili is not just a “cosmetic” worry. Bilirubin easily crosses the blood brain barrier of infants and can cause serious developmental problems (ie, kernicterious.) If a baby truly has hyperbili (visible jaundice (yellowing) before 24 hours of life, a bili level above 12 in the first 24 hours of life, etc), there is no amount of breastfeeding, or stooling that can prevent this. These babies need treatment, phototherapy, to prevent brain damage.
Sorry if I sound “preachy” but this conversation was making me nervous that hyperbili was being “pooh -poohed” as a inconsequential thing.

“Those who are critical of the assembly-line approach point out that preempting the physiological process is likely to increase problems such as retained placenta, postpartum hemorrhage, and respiratory distress in babies. Studies have shown that delayed cord-clamping allows between twenty and fifty percent of the baby’s blood volume to flow into the baby. Early cord clamping also results in lower hematocrit or hemoglobin values in the newborn (fewer red blood cells).” This is taken directly from Ina Mays guide to childbirth, in which she refers to the hospitals tendency of clamping and cutting at the first opportunity as the ‘assembly like approach’. I tend to agree with the idea of not trying to beat nature to the punch.

Why, that must be why all those animals frantically tear at the cord immediately on delivery, and why, when they don’t, their offspring don’t survive.
Oh, hang on, that’s not right now, is it….;)

It’s a miracle my son has any blood at all then, because we didn’t clamp his cord for an hour.

this one isnt mine, but my OB said the same thing, so I called every MW in town and switched HCPs(at 33 wks)

I had the cord clamping argument during my very short pushing stage with #4. She delayed for 30 seconds and then clamped. He was more then great and the only one of my babies who was pale as a ghost and not yellow (although my other three were early clamped… not yellow enough to need Bili lights though). Totally believe it was the delay… even though it was a short delay .

I was at a birth where my clients specifically requested delayed cord cutting for cultural reasons. They were assured over and over that this was ok. So the first thing the nurses do after the birth is say, “Don’t worry, we didn’t forget you want to delay the cutting of the cord!!!” – and they CLAMPED it anyway.

:::smacks forehead:::

I had an OB say this to me when reading over my birth plan at my first prenatal! When he read the part about not pulling on the cord, he stated that “He didn’t have all day to sit there and wait.” Needless to say, he did NOT deliver my baby. I went on to find a very hands off CNM in the next city away.