Stop Asking For The Daddy Stitch After Birth

A week before I gave birth to my first baby, my mother told me her story. After she gave birth to me, her doctor had joked with my father about “putting in an extra stitch” for him while sewing her up.

She had just delivered vaginally, and she knew the joke meant one thing: a tighter fit for sex after the healing process. My mother was appalled and embarrassed. “I couldn’t believe your father let the doctor say that in front of me,” she said. Sadly, my mother isn’t the only woman who’s told me she’s heard this joke. The “extra stitch for daddy,” or “daddy stitch,” joke is awful, and we need to stop making it.

Stop Asking For The Daddy Stitch After Birth

There is always truth in comedy, and I’m sorry to say that the “daddy stitch” is not an urban legend. It’s commonly called “the husband stitch” and was originally conceptualized in the 1950s as a way to “tighten things up” after repairing episiotomies, which were routine back then. Dr. Robert Barbieri, chair of obstetrics and gynaecology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told the Huffington Post, “What they thought is that if they did a routine episiotomy, they’d have a chance to repair it and that during the repair, they could actually create a better perineum than if they hadn’t done it. The idea [was] that we could ‘tighten things up.'”

Were you told this “joke”, would your husband or partner say something?

The last thing you want to hear after giving birth is a joke about making your vagina tighter, the stitch actually makes i harder  more painful for the woman, so te woman is less likely to want to have sex with her partner anyway.

Pelvic floor exercises should help to put things back to how they were without causing unnecessary pain.

So doctors and partners listen up, stop being so damn crude and support the woman so Stop Asking For The Daddy Stitch After Birth .