I stumbled on an old news article from 2010 in the Children’s Health section of MSNBC News online. It was a news article explaining a study on delayed cord cutting. The article reports about an entry in Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. That journal entry explained that cord blood had many health benefits to the newborn child that they didn’t know about when the practice of immediate cord clamping and cord cutting first started taking place routinely.
“Ob-gyns and parents should think about giving the cord blood to the baby,” said lead researcher Paul Sanberg of the University of South Florida. “It only takes a few minutes.”
Think about?! No. Ob-gyns should be routinely allowing babies to have the cord blood they are naturally intended to get. It’s in their best interests. This article was from two years ago, and yet I still hear stories from women giving birth who are scoffed at by their ob-gyns when they say they want to wait to cut the cord until after it stops pulsating. Is two years not enough time to get the memo out and change procedure when it so significantly benefits our babies?
“It only takes a few minutes,” the lead researcher said.
A few minutes that can make an incredible difference in the strength and health of the child. The study admitted that they realize that cord blood isn’t just normal blood. It also contains stem cells… stem cells that were meant for the baby.
“It is nature’s first stem cell transplant,” he went on to say.
But, hey, let’s face it, birth already ends up taking longer than hospitals would like. That few minutes not standing around waiting for the cord to stop pulsating is a real drag. Unless…. Maybe they could call it a stem cell transplant and charge an extra grand for it. Maybe then they’ll get the memo.