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March 14, 2012

Study Says Umbilical Cord Shouldn’t Be Pulled During Labor

Delivery without pulling on the umbilical cord may be a simpler way to keep some women from bleeding to death in childbirth, a new study has found.

In Africa and Asia, postpartum hemorrhage kills a third of the women who die in childbirth, and health agencies constantly struggle to refine midwife training to prevent those deaths. (Above, a maternity ward in Sudan.)

Many midwives are now trained to deliver the baby, give the mother a shot of oxytocin to help her uterus contract, clamp the cord and pull steadily on it to get the placenta out. Then they massage the uterus to help it tighten and to cut off blood flow.

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