The gentlebirth.org website is provided courtesy of
Ronnie Falcao, LM MS,
a homebirth midwife in Mountain View, CA
The gentlebirth.org website is provided courtesy of
Ronnie Falcao, LM MS,
a homebirth midwife in Mountain View, CA
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I just had my mind expanded this morning by Laureen Hudson's hour long online session on how to use the internet to get a message out. Laureen's session “Creating an Online Presence," gave me a wealth of information in a short time and impressed me with how many people are out there who completely rely on the internet for their information. I needed that, and maybe you do, too. - Ina May Gaskin I just hung up the phone from doing the hour long session with
Laureen Hudson on “Creating an Online Presence”. Laureen’s know-how
and expertise were enough to wake up even the birth oldtimers like me and
Ina May to the many unused opportunities of the internet. Laureen’s
engaging and easygoing teaching style made even those scary (to me) terms
like “hypertext, streaming, wordpress, technorati, feedreader and trackback”
start to make sense. Her passion is to reach the generation of young
women who have not yet given birth BEFORE they fall into the black hole
of aggressive obstetrics. I came away from the class today with lots
of ways to improve my website and make it more modern, usable and interesting
for readers. This class will run again this coming Friday (August
22) and I heartily recommend it.
Cost: $35 per session Each session will be 60 minutes in length Creating An Online Presence
Search!
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Very early clamping results in less than physiologic blood volume. The normal, term child routinely survives, but clamping the cord of a compromised child before ventilation is riskier. Initial aeration of the lungs causes reflex dilatation of pulmonary arterioles and a massive increase in pulmonary blood flow. Placental transfusion normally supplies this volume. Clamping the cord before the infant's first breath results in blood being sacrificed from other organs to establish pulmonary perfusion. Fatality may result if the child is already hypovolemic.
Because placental transfusion patterns vary widely, it is futile to attempt to give the newborn the "right" amount of blood by clamping at a set time after birth. However, it is extremely likely that the infant will have less-than-optimal blood volume if the cord is clamped before the lungs are ventilated.
In clinical practice, late clamping produces a high hematocrit, high blood pressure, and vasodilatation to accommodate the large volume of blood. These latter two factors should increase tissue perfusion. In searching the literature, I was unable to find any documented case of hyperviscosity syndrome in which the cord was clamped late, although I did find many documented cases of late clamping involving normal newborns with high hematocrits.
There are, however, many documented cases of hyperviscosity syndrome with high hematocrits (e.g., cases involving gestational diabetes or postmaturity) in which the cord was clamped before physiologic cord closure, thus creating low blood volume, low blood pressure, and vasoconstriction coupled with the polycythemia. The inadequate tissue perfusion is blamed on the high hematocrit, when the root cause of the hyperviscosity syndrome is hypovolemic vasoconstriction enforced to the fourth power.
-excerpted from George M. Morley, MB., CH. B, Cord Closure: Can Hasty
Clamping Injure the Newborn? July 1998 OBG Management.
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