A belly button piercing goes through significant stress during pregnancy as your abdomen stretches and your navel changes shape. Most people can keep their piercing throughout pregnancy with some adjustments, but the combination of skin stretching, immune changes, and physical pressure creates real risks worth understanding before you decide what to do with your jewelry.
How Your Belly Button Changes During Pregnancy
As your uterus expands, it pushes outward against your abdominal wall. This pressure can flatten your belly button entirely or push it out into a pronounced “outie,” typically around 26 weeks. The skin around your navel stretches thin and taut, and that stretched skin can feel sore, tender, or itchy, even without a piercing in the mix.
Now add a piece of jewelry to that equation. As your baby bump grows and the skin pulls tight, the piercing gets tugged along with it. This pulling can cause soreness, redness, and small tears in the skin around the piercing hole. Those micro-tears are the main concern: broken skin on a body that’s already running a somewhat suppressed immune system creates an easy entry point for bacteria.
The Real Risks: Tearing, Infection, and Rejection
Three things can go wrong with a belly button piercing during pregnancy, and they tend to build on each other.
- Skin tears: The stretching skin can pull away from the jewelry, creating tiny wounds around the piercing site. These tears are more likely in the third trimester when your belly is at its largest.
- Infection: Pregnancy weakens your immune system to some degree, which means your body is slower to fight off bacteria that enters through those tears. Signs of infection include increasing redness, warmth, swelling, discharge, or pain that gets worse rather than better.
- Migration and rejection: As your skin thins and stretches, the piercing can gradually shift position. In some cases, the body treats the jewelry as a foreign object and slowly pushes it toward the surface, a process called rejection. This leaves a wider, more visible scar than simply removing the jewelry would.
If your piercing was still healing when you became pregnant, the risks go up considerably. An unhealed piercing hole can widen as your belly expands, and the combination of a larger wound and slower healing makes infection much more likely. Navel piercings take 6 to 12 months to fully heal, so if yours is newer than that, removal is the safer choice.
Keeping Your Piercing In: Flexible Retainers
If your piercing is fully healed and you want to keep it open, switching from metal jewelry to a flexible pregnancy retainer is the most common approach. These retainers are made from PTFE (a type of medical-grade plastic) or Bioflex, both of which bend with your body as your belly grows instead of pulling rigidly against the skin. You can trim them to the exact length you need as your belly changes size.
Flexible retainers reduce the pulling and pressure that cause tears, and they won’t interfere with ultrasound imaging the way metal jewelry can. Metal piercings can disrupt the ultrasound signal, and you’ll likely be asked to remove them before appointments. A plastic retainer avoids that hassle entirely.
Even with a retainer, keep an eye on the piercing site throughout your pregnancy. Clean it gently with saline, avoid tight waistbands that press against it, and don’t ignore signs that the skin is thinning or tearing. If the area becomes red, painful, or starts producing discharge, take the retainer out.
Taking Your Piercing Out
Many people choose to simply remove their jewelry during pregnancy, especially if they notice discomfort starting in the second trimester. The big worry is that the hole will close, and that’s a legitimate possibility. How quickly it closes depends on how long you’ve had the piercing and how much your skin stretches. A piercing you’ve had for several years is more likely to stay open (or at least partially open) than one that’s relatively new.
Some people thread a thin piece of fishing line or PTFE retainer through the hole periodically to keep it from sealing shut. This works for some, though it’s not guaranteed if the skin stretches dramatically.
If the hole does close, re-piercing after pregnancy is straightforward. The standard recommendation is to wait at least 6 to 12 months after giving birth before getting re-pierced, giving your skin time to stabilize and any stretch marks or scarring to fully settle. Re-piercing through scar tissue can be slightly more uncomfortable than the original piercing, but an experienced piercer can usually work with the existing site.
What About C-Sections?
If you’re having a planned or emergency cesarean delivery, all jewelry needs to come out. Metal jewelry poses risks during surgery, and even a plastic retainer in the navel area could interfere with the surgical site or the sterile field. If a C-section is a possibility for you, plan ahead for easy removal. This is another reason flexible retainers are practical: they’re simple to take out quickly compared to threaded metal barbells.
After Delivery: What to Expect
Once your baby arrives, your belly gradually shrinks back, though the skin around your navel may not return to its pre-pregnancy state. Stretch marks, looser skin, and a slightly different belly button shape are all common. Your piercing may sit differently than it did before, looking slightly lower, more stretched, or at a different angle.
If you kept the piercing in throughout pregnancy and the hole has stretched or migrated, you have a few options. You can let it heal in its new position and see if it settles into a shape you’re happy with. You can remove it and let it close, then re-pierce once your skin has fully recovered. Or, if scarring is significant, some people opt for a minor cosmetic procedure to reshape the area before re-piercing, though this is rarely necessary.