Why are newborns blue? + Midwife questions.

[texmati]

This was sorta xposted in my ddc.

I'm just wondering what you guys would do in this situation.

I have a midwife who works in a combination practice with ob's. She's the only midwife who delivers out of a 'baby friendly' hospital near my home (one with a birthing tub, and pro breastfeeding policies, and they don't put babies in the nursery, ect).

And we seem to click. She takes my DH seriously (which is really important to me), answers both or our questions, and spends a lot of time with us at each appointment. She seems like the right amount of 'flakey' for us.

But at both appointments she's just said a few things that were.... off.

The first appointment she told us that amnio's had a 40% chance of miscarriage, and that children born to women over 35 have a 40% chance of a chromosomal defect. The reason that amnio's are recommened for women over 35 is because the two percentages are equal.

This appointment I asked a ton of questions, and felt really reassured, because she sounded really smart. But just as she was walking out the door, she mentioned that I didn't need to take B12, because I was a vegetarian. But that's not true-- it's the opposite.

Finally... DH and I had asked her why some of the pics on the net showed the newborns being so blue-- she said that all babies are blue inside the womb, that the blood from the umbilical cord was blue. They only pinked up when they started breathing air. I belived her... but now I'm wondering if that's just bogus. Does anyone know what's really true?

And more importantly, what would you do about the midwife? Would you just assume that these things were just slips of the tounge?

[snowmom5]

Sounds like perhaps she's half-right about a lot of things. She's half-right about the amnio - indeed the general risk of m/c is the same as the risk for downs at age 35, which is why it's common to be offered amnio starting at that age (ignoring the fact that the risk of m/c can be very different for different providers, but that's another story). But it isn't anywhere remotely close to 40% - that's crazy. It's more like less than 1%, I can't remember. (I've never chosen to do amnio in spite of being old, but her numbers are WAY off there.)

Yeah, it would bug me, unless it was more a slip of the tongue - like she accidentally misspoke.

[TzippityDoulah]

yeah I'm going with the "half right" thing... sounds like a good way to put it.

if you're comfortable with her knowing her stuff in some areas, and less in others and you're comfortable with her in general, I wouldn't worry about it. but I would be concerned if it meant that I was "required" to hand over the reigns in the hospital to her and she didn't know basic things...

[Jane]

As air-breathers, we have red (oxgenated) blood in our arteries and purple (deoxgenated) blood in our veins. The deoxygenated blood returns to the heart, gets oxgenated in the lungs (returns to about 99% saturated with oxygen) and then gets pumped to the body.
Fetuses in the womb don't run that type of system. They get their oxygenated blood through the umbilical cord and it's much similar all throughout the body, instead of having two different parts of the system like we have. It runs about 60% oxygenated at maxium. Babies do come out as a different color than after they start breathing. I don't know if I'd call it blue, but it's different.

I think that a person that mis-spoke like that would drive me nuts, especially in labor. But it would be a personal choice, then, to find someone else.

[Defenestrator]

Newborns are blue because their oxygen saturation levels are lower on the inside than on the outside. Oxygen saturation levels for fetuses are about 40-50% and for newborns are above 90%. So there is more oxygen in their blood once they start to breathe.

It is now thought that the miscarriage rate for amniocentesis is overestimated. For a long time the 1 in 200 rate has been quoted, because that is the number of babies who will miscarry whose mothers have had amnios. But that number doesn't take into account the fact that the second trimester miscarriage rate of babies whose mothers don't have amnios is not zero. So the amnio can't be said to have caused all of those miscarriages.