Inside the Growing Practice of 'Seeding' Babies Born Via C-Section

Babies born via C-section may be more prone to allergies and other issues because they miss out on vital microbes in mom’s birth canal — but a practice called “seeding” aims to make up for that. (Photo: Muratseyit/Getty Images)

Seems like there’s a new hip, must-try birth practice unveiled with regularity these days — hypnobirthing, placenta eating, delayed umbilical-cord clamping — and now, for women having C-sections, “seeding,” or the practice of swabbing a newborn with healthy bacteria collected from mom’s vagina to reap a host of health benefits.

“My doctor had never heard of it, but thought it sounded like a great idea,” says Carolyn Weiss of Brooklyn, who plans to try seeding when she has her second child via planned C-section in January. The basically simple process will involve Weiss, 37, inserting a piece of saline-soaked gauze into her vagina for at least an hour before her baby’s birth, transferring it to a sealed plastic bag, and then having her husband swab their newborn with the material, making a special effort to wipe fluid into the baby’s orifices. “The mouth is most important,” she tells Yahoo Parenting, noting that her first baby, now almost 2, had severe eczema, and some suggested to her that it could have been because she was born via cesarean.

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So what’s it all about? Preliminary scientific research has shown health differences between babies born vaginally and by C-section — with those removed surgically being more prone to allergies, diabetes, asthma, obesity, autoimmune diseases, and other conditions, possibly because they don’t get coated in mom’s birth-canal fluids, which include a healthy dose of bacteria. (Results of a study just released Tuesday, in fact, have found that women with a particular pattern of vaginal bacteria — specifically, low levels of healthy lactobacillus bacteria — may be at higher risk of having a premature baby.)

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Trillions of microbes, collectively called microbiome by scientists, reside in our bodies — on the skin or in the gut, mouth, or vagina, where their presence plays a vital role in human health but can lead to health problems when they are out of balance or deficient. It’s why newborns who don’t get to pass through the estimated 300 to 400 species of microbes in mom’s vagina may be at a health disadvantage, according to Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, a microbiologist at New York University School of Medicine who is at the forefront of research about seeding. She recently studied 21 babies in Puerto Rico and found that swab seeding positively affected the microbiome in newborns.

“The main question is, of course, can we reduce the risk of these infants for diseases that seem to be increased by C-section birthing, such as asthma, obesity? We have not done this study but are trying to get financial support to do it in enough babies to reach conclusive results,” Dominguez-Bello tells Yahoo Parenting. “We know from preliminary results that the process only partially restores natural microbes, and that the natural [birth] process should be the desirable birthing mode whenever possible.” That’s the message of a 2014 documentary, “Microbirth,” which addresses the importance of mom passing on her microbes to her baby at birth, and the idea of seeding when that’s not possible.

Dominguez-Bello, who appears in the film, stresses that the combo of C-sections and seeding should not be thought of as an equal replacement for natural birth. She elaborated on the issue in a radio interview with WBUR last year.

“People have asked me, ‘Isn’t your work going to stimulate C-sections instead of making mothers aware? People could say, ‘Oh, fine, I’ll have a C-section and use the gauze,’” she said. “My response is that the microbes are just one part of labor, and we don’t understand completely the whole process and why it is important. Plus, with the restoration we did, we do restore the bacteria partially but not completely. And also, the mother’s body prepares to breastfeed, for example — and who knows how many other things — much better after a natural birth than a C-section. A C-section is a sudden interruption of a process before the process finishes. So the body of the mother doesn’t even know that the baby’s out. It takes a while for the body to realize, ‘Oh, there is no baby.’ It’s really an insult to a process that ideally should end naturally, and only by necessity should it be interrupted.”

While the practice is too new for the numbers of adherents to be reflected in any statistics, an increase in media coverage, along with anecdotal evidence, shows rising interest. “I do think, by the number of emails I am receiving, that the process is growing in popularity,” Dominguez-Bello says.

Dr. Philippe Girerd, an OB/GYN with the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center and a member of the highly specific information-sharing Vaginal Microbiome Consortium, is a proponent.

“My gut on this is that it’s going to become standard,” he tells Yahoo Parenting. “Because of my work, I became aware of the effect of what’s called the ‘imprinting’ of the immune system on a baby at birth. So I started offering it — I work closely with midwives and really value their input.” Women who lean toward natural birthing and the use of midwives, Girerd says, seem to be most interested in seeding. He added, “Although there are no studies to prove its efficacy, we started offering it because common sense tells you that it would expose infants to the same microbes they would get with a vaginal birth.“

Whenever he does the procedure of swabbing down a newborn with mom’s microbe-soaked gauze, “It seems to disturb the nurses quite a bit,” Girerd notes with a chuckle. “If it’s happening passively [in the birth canal], nobody really thinks about it. But when you do it with forceps and gauze, it makes some people very uncomfortable. It’s active versus passive.” While Girerd says he’s happy to do the swabbing of newborns for parents, many doctors are not — including Weiss’s, which is why she’s got her husband ready for the task. “They’re worried about liability,” Girerd explains.

He stresses that women who have had C-sections in the past and who are concerned about the passing on of microbes in a subsequent birth are better off aiming for a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean). That’s because the longer a woman naturally labors — whether the birth winds up being vaginal or not — the longer the baby has to soak up mom’s vital microbes, which there’s no chance of with a scheduled cesarean. “If someone tries to deliver vaginally and is allowed to labor long enough for the membranes to rupture [meaning the water has broken], then that’s better than seeding,” he says. “So if the idea of seeding threatens someone aiming for VBAC, then the doctor hasn’t spent enough time explaining it to the patient.”

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