Jun 15, 2026 · 33 min · 9 segments
In this "Mailbag" edition of the Healthful Woman podcast, Dr. Nathan Fox answers listener questions covering a range of women's health and obstetric topics. He addresses questions about…
Welcome to our mailbag podcast, our thirty-fourth What Does the Fox Say? Our first question is from Sarah.
My OB sent my placenta to pathology after the birth of my third child due to a history of some form of adherent placenta with the birth of my second.
It came back weeks later showing chorioamnionitis." For our listeners, that means an infection.
Is this typical? Can chorioamnionitis not be a big deal? My water did possibly break a day before delivery, but if it did, it was more like a leak.
I did not have a big gush until about six hours prior to delivery." All right, Sarah.
In terms of your question, right, so chorioamnionitis is the term that we use clinically for someone who we believe has an infection in the uterus in labor.
It's called that 'cause a chorio is one of the-- chorion is one of the membranes, amnio or amnion is one of the membranes.
So when someone has chorioamnionitis in labor, that essentially means we believe there's an infection inside the uterine cavity.
Typically, the way we know it's there, the diagnosis is made when the mom has a fever in labor, and usually it's accompanied by either a fast heart rate in the baby, what we call tachycardia, or a fast heart rate in the mother.
Or sometimes if it's really bad, we can see the amniotic fluid that's coming out actually appears infected.
And so when someone has that or we suspect someone has that in labor, we typically give them antibiotics.
If they have it and they weren't in labor, we would induce them, right? Okay, so that's sort of how we manage it clinically.
Now, after delivery, after the baby's born, after the placenta's born, we have an option to send the placenta to pathology, which means instead of just discarding the placenta, we send it to the hospital pathology laboratory like you would send any other organ that gets removed during surgery or something like that, and they basically, they look at it as a whole.
Then they take it and, you know, slice it up and look at it under a microscope, and they'll give you all these various findings in the placenta.
And every now and again, it'll come back with changes that are suggestive of inflammation or infection in the placenta, in the membranes, in the cord, and there's different sort of grades of it, and there's different ways that they score it and how severe it is is one part of it.
Welcome to our mailbag podcast, our thirty-fourth What Does the Fox Say? Our first question is from Sarah.
My OB sent my placenta to pathology after the birth of my third child due to a history of some form of adherent placenta with the birth of my second.
It came back weeks later showing chorioamnionitis." For our listeners, that means an infection.
Is this typical? Can chorioamnionitis not be a big deal? My water did possibly break a day before delivery, but if it did, it was more like a leak.
I did not have a big gush until about six hours prior to delivery." All right, Sarah.
In terms of your question, right, so chorioamnionitis is the term that we use clinically for someone who we believe has an infection in the uterus in labor.
It's called that 'cause a chorio is one of the-- chorion is one of the membranes, amnio or amnion is one of the membranes.
So when someone has chorioamnionitis in labor, that essentially means we believe there's an infection inside the uterine cavity.
Typically, the way we know it's there, the diagnosis is made when the mom has a fever in labor, and usually it's accompanied by either a fast heart rate in the baby, what we call tachycardia, or a fast heart rate in the mother.
Or sometimes if it's really bad, we can see the amniotic fluid that's coming out actually appears infected.
And so when someone has that or we suspect someone has that in labor, we typically give them antibiotics.
If they have it and they weren't in labor, we would induce them, right? Okay, so that's sort of how we manage it clinically.
Now, after delivery, after the baby's born, after the placenta's born, we have an option to send the placenta to pathology, which means instead of just discarding the placenta, we send it to the hospital pathology laboratory like you would send any other organ that gets removed during surgery or something like that, and they basically, they look at it as a whole.
Then they take it and, you know, slice it up and look at it under a microscope, and they'll give you all these various findings in the placenta.
And every now and again, it'll come back with changes that are suggestive of inflammation or infection in the placenta, in the membranes, in the cord, and there's different sort of grades of it, and there's different ways that they score it and how severe it is is one part of it.
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