Stillbirth or death inside the woman’s uterus before the fetus is delivered poses a lot of questions. One of which is how to know if it is dead and the harder question is, how long can it stay there without posing harm to the mother.
Generally speaking anything that is not part of the human body is considered foreign and can cause serious health risks if not removed immediately. In this case, a dead fetus is one of them. There is however, another point of argument to this, being that the amniotic sac holds the products of conception secure and that it poses no risk to the mother as long as this is intact before the dead fetus is delivered.
A research on this topic will give you very scarce results. There are however, two major issues to this problem; one of which is to know what caused the death and another is what health risk it pose to the mother.
Since it was already mentioned that it is now considered foreign it may place the mother’s health in danger at some point.
Normally, since pregnancy is a normal process, the woman usually detects fetal death due to the absence of fetal movement and the normal process follows with the uterus detecting this and naturally expelling the dead fetus.
In some instances however, it stays a bit longer from 3 days to 6 weeks. In these rare cases, induction of the labor process may be done or in still rarer cases dilatation and curettage or a cesarean section may be necessary.
There are however, delicate factors that need to be weighed and considered, like the general health of the woman and the chances of developing complications like severe Hemorrhage, Eclampsia And Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation, if and only if aggressive measures are to be taken.
While doing a research on this, a very odd article showed in the research bar, that of an old woman from South China who carried a dead fetus in her uterus for 60 long years! If you’ll ask if this is possible, here’s what the doctor who examined her has to say, “I could not believe my own eyes when it turned out that Yuidjun has a baby in her uterus. I haven’t seen anything more surprising and more strange in all my 40 years of practice as a doctor”, confessed Dr. Lyu Anbin from the Gwingshen hospital.
More Resources:
Safe Baby Pregnancy Tips – Visual Instructions For Expecting Parents
