Umbilical Cord Strikes a Chord With Me: Truly Marvelous Design

My wife and I are having our first child in about, oh, six weeks from now. Which means that the baby could come in a month or less. Which is just insane to me.

She has this book that her close friend, Kari, gave to her. It's a journal where mothers-to-be can record their thoughts and reflections. It also includes handy info on childbirth in other cultures (in nearly every culture, for example, women bury their placenta in the ground), and it details what exactly is happening to the mother and to the baby, developmentally.

I found this out today. Apparently, the umbilical, which is about two feet long, has an internal pressure that is similiar to a garden hose with a full stream of water running through it. That's so it won't kink, because if it kinks, the baby gets hungry real fast.

Now, the obvious question is, "What happens after the birth when you cut it?"

I mean, with a pressure similiar to a garden hose, this could create a real problem, both for the baby and for the mother. Imagine a garden hose spraying blood. Ick. Well, in the USA, nurses and doctors clamp the chord. But they don't really need to.

See, I learned that the umbilical cord is covered in this think jelly substance, similiar to petroleum jelly. Most of the time, the cord is floating in amniotic fluid, but when that jelly is exposed to air, it immediately constricts and contracts, choking off the the blood supply, making the cord safe to cut. Without this, there could be massive blood loss.

So even before there were clamps, and doctors, mom and baby were taken care of.

Is that not astounding? The whole thing just makes me want to personally thank God for such forward-thinking design principles.