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Posted by ellie on April 1, 2008 · Leave a Comment  

Many women are able to wear belly rings and other body jewelry throughout their pregnancies with no problems. Every body is different though, and your body may react a little differently. It’s not uncommon for the navel ridge to thin during pregnancy, making a belly ring more uncomfortable. If you want to keep your navel piercing open, a piercing professional will have suggestions on how to best do that.

The most common suggestion is to change your metal ring for more flexible body jewelry or a piece of monofilament nylon fishing line. If the piercing is relatively new and hasn’t yet had a chance to heal fully, it may be better to let it close and re-open the piercing after delivery.

Most doctors agree that navel jewelry is usually comfortable up to about the sixth month. After that, some women find that their navel has pushed out, or that their ring or bar is getting banged more often. It may be enough to change out your usual ring for a banana bar, which moves with your body more easily. If the piercing has been open long enough to be completely healed and you’re accustomed to changing your navel jewelry, you could try to keep it open by running a piece of body jewelry through it and wearing it a few hours each day. Before you decide to do this, though, speak to your piercing professional to get their recommendation.

A newer option is to replace the metal belly jewelry with a PFTE bar. PFTE (Polytetrafluoroethylene) is the material that they use to make artificial heart valves. It is soft, flexible and can be sterilized. Some of the advantages of a PFTE bar are:

It’s very flexible and will bend with you (and the baby as it grows)It’s less likely to have skin stick to it, making healing easier and quickerIt doesn’t conduct heat so it doesn’t get hot in the sun and burn your skinIt can be cut to exactly the right size with a pair of scissorsIt’s threaded, so that you can wear your favorite ends, caps or gems on the ends of a PFTE barThe PFTE bar can be sterilized just like metal

If you are considering getting pierced during your pregnancy:

Most reputable piercers will either refuse to do the piercing, or discourage you from it. The Association of Professional Piercers’ official position is that your body should be concentrating on the task of keeping you and your baby healthy during pregnancy, and piercing distracts from that task. At least as importantly, if you contract or develop any sort of infection because of the piercing, you could be putting your baby at risk. This holds true of nearly any piercing, but is especially important in navel piercings – not, as you might think because of its physical proximity to the growing baby, but because navel piercings are more prone to infection and take far longer to heal.

If you’re concerned that your nipple piercing will interfere with your ability to breastfeed a baby, there’s good news. Because of the structure of the breast, it’s very unlikely that a piercing will block all the milk ducts. The La Leche League strongly suggests removing nipple jewelry during actual nursing because of the risk of injury to the baby. It’s possible for jewelry to get loose and become lodged in the baby’s throat, or for the hard edges of metal or plastic to injure the baby’s gums, tongue, soft palate or hard palate.

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