HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!

::deep breath::

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!

Can be a legit concern, but the OB is missing a critical part of the equation. If the mother isn’t hassled (rushed, examined internally, or, ahem, subjected to pulling the baby out manually! etc.) then the cervix won’t do that!

Has that/can that ever happen?! And, aren’t some twins born a significant amount of time apart from each other? I don’t know enough to comment, but it sounds pretty uncommon and far fetched. Does anyone know of any links I can read?

My understanding was that you DON’T want to do that since you can cause cervical swelling that can prevent either the baby or the placenta from being born.

Crazy OB! Y U NO MAKE SENSE!?

The cervix doesn’t ‘choke the baby.’ If it were to swell (because of their manipulations and rushing, as someone else already noted) to could prevent the head from fitting through. If the first baby’s head fit through there’s no reason to expect that the second baby’s head won’t also…unless someone is in there mucking things up.

And if the cervix is closing then we definitely someone PULLING on the baby with is head stil inside the uterus! Of course!

I thought in the old days it wasn’t unheard-of for twins to be born days or even weeks apart.

Ummm….
I’m a twin, but it was a complete surprise. When I was born they did not do routine ultrasounds, so they didn’t know that my mother was having twins. My sister was quite high up, and had dislocated my mother’s ribcage, so they never heard but one heartbeat.
After I was born labor stopped and they were taking me out of the room and sewing my mother up when they noticed a second baby. I believe they induced labor via a shot of pitocin and my sister was born 16 minutes after I was.
She was born breech, so she couldn’t have gotten her head stuck anyway, but it was obviously not necessary for anyone to stick a hand up in my mother to hold the door for my sister.

Um, then how does the placenta come out?

Fail.

C’mon guys, maybe this OB just has a lot of experience at making cervixes close up. They tend to do that in times of stress– like when you are in labor and you have a stupid, condescending doctor!

Again, a legitimate concern, second twins do have risks that their siblings do not BUT this is a bogus explanation. So often we see these ridiculous reasons/excuses, like they think women are too stupid or ignorant to understand the truth.

I’m picturing some sort of monster vagina that wants to eat babies. Nom nom nom.

I would love to hear more about research/experience of problems where second twins who are breech literally get stuck because of a *closing cervix*. I suppose I could understand this concern if the cervix was already swollen…but I’m not a medical care provider and thus don’t have the experience to say much more about *this*.

I do wonder if the concern is with footling breech birth *in general*. Maybe the doctor was thinking about examples of singleton footling breech births in which the feet, legs, and torso are “delivered” before the shoulders and the head (and before the cervix is fully dilated)?

I do know that breech *extractions* (where someone “goes in” and pulls the feet/legs down) do increase the risk of a nuchal arm, which can make a breech birth more complicated. (I have actually seen this in my work as a doula. And yes, it DID make the birth quite complicated.)