Ask Mama Tao-Dairy Birth

Dear Mama Tao,
My friend recently had a "dairy birth" which of course as you know consists of giving birth in a bathtub full of raw cow’s milk, can you please explain its benefits & how it differs from a water birth?

Writer,

This is a refreshing question. Originally started in 1879 by our very own Ida Mae Gherkin, the Dairy Birth or Milky Way was created as a way for midwifes to seen the exact color and texture of the fluids rushing out of the mother during a water birth. In most cases, water tends to dilute the leakage. Ida found a milk bath during labor to be helpful.

Over the years hundreds of studies have been done on the subject and none of them came back positive. We chose to be free and not listen to their “logic”.

It is a totally made up fact that a milk bath during labor will make you and your babies skin as soft as an angles! Also, milk is easier to clear out of babies lungs when they come out of the vagina and nearly drown after hitting a liquid instead of air.

It can take up to 100 gallons (or 300 quarts for you metric speaking folks) to fill up the average birth pool, then there is the question of heating the milk. For my milk bath I used the method pictured below:

Finally, the best plus to a Dairy Birth is that everything is totally eatable after! You waste almost none of the placenta in the process and it milk is only filled with your families germs! No big deal. After my birth we scooped up the milk and made stocks, cheese and butter with it! Yum Yum!