09/20/2019
The baby and her placenta is called the Feto-Placental Unit, and blood circulates within that unit while she is growing in the womb. In the middle of your pregnancy, because the placenta is almost as big as the baby, blood is equally distributed between the two. Gradually, the baby gets bigger than the placenta, so that by the end of the pregnancy, the baby's body holds two thirds of her blood, and the placenta holds one third.
On the onset of birth, a powerful surge of placental transfusion to the baby begins. If you have seen birth photos, you can tell from an engorged cord that the birth has just occurred. Within twenty minutes, the natural transfusion has occurred and most cords are limp and drained.
What happens with practice of immediate cord cutting is that body's oxygen carrying capacity is significantly diminished.
In a grown-up body, we have a name for this kind of condition. A loss of thirty to forty percent of your total blood volume is a called a Class 3 Hemorrhagic Shock. It is an emergency, with the risk of damaging tissues, organs and brain cells for the lack of this vital oxygen. The treatment for this is a blood transfusion.
There is rarely a reason to immediately clamp and cut the cord. Even a baby requiring resuscitation will significantly benefit from being left attached to the cord/placenta during rescue procedures and nearly all procedures can and should be done bedside, with an intact cord.
Immediate cord clamping isn’t the physiologic norm and should be treated as the modern medical experiment that it is.
