A Woman who Gave Birth
The Torah says that after giving birth to a baby boy the mother is tameh for seven days automatically. For a girl she is tameh for fourteen days. On a torah level after seven or fourteen days she can go to mikveh and begin a new period of time called ‘yemey tohar’. For the next thirty three days for a baby boy or sixty six days for a baby girl, any blood that a woman sees then is tahor.[1] However, when a woman gives birth if she sees blood she is tameh as a zavah, as a result of Rabbi Zeira’s stringency. Once she is a zavah she remains tameh until she can get seven clean days. Furthermore, even if no blood came out when she gave birth she is rendered a zavah based on the principle that there must have been some blood if the uterus opened to give birth. Therefore, today all women who give birth are a niddah until they can have shiva nekiyim and go to the mikveh. These shiva nekiyim have to be free of any blood, whether they are in the first seven or fourteen days or yemey tohar.
- Practically, every woman who gives birth is tameh until she has the regular process of waiting before the shiva nekiyim, the hefsek tahara, shiva nekiyim and mikveh.
- There is a practice that a woman wouldn’t go to the mikveh until she has seven clean days and also waited 40 days after having a boy or 80 days after having a girl. Today this minhag isn’t widespread.
- If a woman had shiva nekiyim and went to mikveh and then saw blood within the days of purity (33 for a boy and 66 for a girl), the minhag of all of klal yisrael is that we treat her as tameh like a niddah for all purposes.
Onset of Niddah before Birth
- Even if the doctor checks and sees that the cervix is 2 centimeters or more open in the 8th or 9th month the woman is still tahor if there wasn't any birth pangs yet. [2]
