In today’s society, with so many births occurring in hospitals and so many interventions being implemented, birth has become a “treatment” instead of the natural process that our species has been doing since the beginning of our time on this planet. One of the things that we have lost sight of in the birthing process is the placenta and it’s roll AFTER birth.
Nearly 1/3 of the blood of a newborn baby is in the placenta during the birthing process. In order for the baby to squeeze through the birthing canal, much of this blood is pushed into the placenta. When the placenta is left attached to the baby and only clamped and cut after it stops pulsating, this blood is a allowed to return to the baby. Babies with delayed cord clamping have lower weight loss as much of the weight loss of a baby can be due to the loss of 25-40% of their blood volume and up to 50% of their red-blood cells due to early clamping.
A recent study has found that infants have better iron levels even 4 months AFTER birth if delayed cord clamping has taken place. And in this study, the delay was only 3 minutes after birth – not until the cord had stopped pulsating.
There are suggestions online that the practice of early cord clamping may have detrimental effects on the infant, such as autism, anemia, hemorrhaging and sepsis.
When my son was born, I didn’t know about any of this information (but I sure wish that I had). Did you? Did you delay cord clamping of any of your little ones? Please leave a comment and share your stories.
