Umbilical Cord Around Neck

Umbilical cord around neck does occur in lots of normal births. My second unassisted childbirth was with an umbilical cord around the neck. I was really scared before, thinking what will I do if the baby is born with an umbilical cord around the neck, but when it did happen to me, and I was holding the baby in my own hands, I just unwrapped the umbilical cord and the baby was just fine. It was born in less than an hour and the fact that the umbilical cord was around the neck, has no effect whatever on the baby's safe birth and breathing. It is important to be calm and in normal births, the parent or the birth attendant, or the midwife and doctor will take care to unwrap the umbilical cord.

If you are giving birth in a hospital, your doctor or midwife will be able to help with the umbilical around the neck. Even if you are giving birth at home, this might not be such a problem, as you can imagine.

See the video below to see how a baby is born completely safe with a vaginal birth and the umbilical cord is unwrapped after birth.

It is good to be aware that the umbilical cord is protected by a jelly-like coating, called Wharton's Jelly. While there is blood running through the arteries and the vein in the umbilical cord, this jelly substance is keeping the cord from being compressed.

Usually it is easy to slip the cord around the baby's head.

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An umbilical cord around the baby's neck does not require any special monitoring for the baby to be born safely.
 

One in four births are born with the umbilical cord around the neck. It is advisable this situation to be recognized quickly. There are three ways to solve the problem:

- unwrap the cord during birth;

- clamp and cut the cord if the umbilical cord is shorter.

Usually if the umbilical cord is around the neck of the baby, the umbilical cord is long, because this occurs when the baby moves more in the womb.

Problems with umbilical cord can be detected even before birth through an ultrasound.

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