Husband stitch

The husband stitch or husband's stitch, also known as the daddy stitch, husband's knot, or vaginal tuck, is a surgical procedure in which one or more additional sutures than necessary are used to repair a woman's perineum after it has been torn or cut during childbirth. The purported purpose is to tighten the opening of the vagina and thereby enhance the pleasure of the patient's male sex partner during penetrative intercourse.

Medical perspective While repair of the perineum may be medically necessary, an extra stitch is not, and may cause discomfort or pain. Use of the term in the medical literature can be traced to Transactions of the Texas State Medical Association in 1885, where a doctor claimed to have performed one.

The term is also referenced in What Women Want to Know (1958), and in The Year After Childbirth: Surviving and Enjoying the First Year of Motherhood, written by Sheila Kitzinger in 1994.

Some medical practitioners have asserted that the procedure is mostly an urban legend, and false attribution, while others have claimed to know doctors who perform the procedure. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, according to a report by Fatherly, does not deny that the procedure happens but alleges that it "is not standard or common". Other doctors, such as Jean Marty, head of the Union of Gynecologists in France, have claimed that the idea of a husband stitch comes from botched episiotomies and poor stitching, that lead women to have pain during sexual intercourse and while urinating.

However, there are several accounts of women who claim to have undergone this procedure without their consent. There have been several journalistic investigations on the existence of the husband stitch, trying to determine if it was real. They have overwhelmingly determined that the practice does exist, as seen in reports by Chelsea Ritschel, by Kaitlin Reilly for Yahoo! Life, by Anam Alam to Thred, and in reports from French newspapers Grazia, and Le Monde.

Belgian researchers Julie Dobbeleir, Koenraad Van Landuyt and Stan J. Monstrey have studied the practice, finding evidence of it happening in Belgium at least since the 1950s:

The husband stitch has also been referenced in a 2004 study about the abuse of episiotomies in São Paulo:

Similarly, in Cambodia, the practice has been linked to high rates of episiotomy:

Popular culture A short story by Carmen Maria Machado, "The Husband Stitch", first published in 2014 in Granta and later published in the collection Her Body and Other Parties, describes a woman undergoing the procedure.

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Husband stitch

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