No More Dinner Plates

Here is why not:

Once we have birthed our babies, the uterus contracts and uses its muscle fibres to tie off the vessels that supplied blood to the placenta during pregnancy and thereby reduces in size massively. This reduction via contraction shears the placenta off the uterine wall beautifully. Imagine you blow up a balloon (baby growing and expanding the uterus) and you stick one of those rigid puffy stickers on it (placenta). When you deflate the balloon (birth the baby), that puffy sticker would come off the balloon (placenta comes off uterine wall) as the surface it is sticking to is shrinking. The sticker stays the same size. You might also be able to see that the area with the sticky residue left on the uterus balloon is massively smaller than it was when the sticker (placenta) was in place. Clear as mud??

So essentially, no......there is no dinner plate sized wound. Though there is the small remnant of the placental site (what, 1-2 inches in diameter?)....a clot forms over it to protect and minimise any further bleeding. It also continually shrinks until the uterus is back to pre-pregnant size in the weeks after birth (remember those after pains??)

A dinner plate/placenta sized wound would only be left if the placenta was removed from the uterus without the uterus contracting at all.....this would result in an immediate severe obstetric emergency and threat to life for the birthing person due to massive haemorrhage.

So, no more dinner plates.

Let’s instead focus on the amazing feat of making a human from scratch, birthing it, shrinking the uterus, accommodating for blood loss, recovering from the effort of birth, healing tears, lactating, not sleeping, adjusting to motherhood mentally and physically etc etc etc. Those are enough reasons to rest, we don’t need to make up extra scary ones!! (Sorry, this was shouty, but it’s a bugbear of mine, plus I’m angry a lot these days 😂😂)