How does the umbilical cord provide all essential functions for a baby while in utero?

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It’s on the baby’s stomach. How does it make air get into its lungs? The placenta is filled with fluids and stuff, so how does the baby breathe with a thing connected to it’s stomach? It also provides food, but how?

In: Biology

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

In addition to all the great info others posted : the umbilicus contain large vein and two arteries that feeds the baby’s blood stream through connections to an hepatic portal vein (in the liver) and the heart via the inferior vena cava. After birth, this artery/vein system shrivels and becomes a little “stump” inside your abdomen no longer connected to your blood stream…

Anonymous 0 Comments

Essentially, the mother’s body treats the developing child as another organ. The umbilical has large veins and arteries that supply nutrition and oxygen from the mother and takes away CO2 and waste products for the mother’s body to dispose of.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your lungs are only needed to get oxygen from outside your body, to inside your body, where it’s promptly dumped into your blood.

Your digestive track is only needed to break down food and extract the nutrients, where it’s then promptly dumped into your blood.

The mother’s body has already done most of the hard work. Her blood already has all the oxygen and nutrients. The placenta is where the the mother’s blood gives all of that to the babies blood, and then the babies blood travels back to the baby through the umbilical cord.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s not like an air tube. Basically oxygen and nutrients are carried from the mother to the baby via the blood vessels in the umbilical cord. You don’t start “breathing” until you are born.

Anonymous 0 Comments

No air inside. Oxygenated blood and the nutrients needed are already in mothers blood stream so go into growing foetus body, they share a blood stream till birth.

Your brain doesn’t need air, food, water etc, other parts of your body take in what they need and feed the rear of your body through blood. Same as baby… exception don’t expect your brain to fall out in 9 months

Anonymous 0 Comments

> How does it make air get into its lungs?

It doesn’t. The umbilical cord delivers oxygen directly through the blood, bypassing the need for lungs altogether. In fact, fetuses’ lungs don’t get fully developed until the 8th month of pregnancy or so.