I have coworkers that have gone on to work in the OR, PACU, NICU, ED, Dr Offices, ICU, med/surg, peds, psych, home health, and probably some other areas I'm not thinking of. L&D is a varied specialty and you will learn a lot. You can spin the experience to work in your favor for almost any specialty. It's good for an ICU nurse because you learn how to deal with complex patients on a 1:1/1:2 ratio, you will learn a lot of the basics you'd learn in med/surg (gtts, I&Os, prioritization, assessment, communication with physicians, etc). You might not be coding patients a lot (hopefully), but you deal with a lot of emergent situations like hemorrhages, stat c-sections, shoulder dystocias, uterine ruptures, abruptions, precipitous deliveries, eclampsia, etc. A lot of our patients have comorbidities like DM, HTN, seizure disorders, psych issues, heart defects, etc. I have even had paralyzed patients that I had to do incontinence and wound care on! You will become very familiar with a well newborn assessment which will help you if you move on to PICU one day. There is also a ton of parent education which is great practice if you want to work in a PICU--you will be dealing with scared parents a lot!
Remember there are a lot of roles an L&D nurse fills. Along with caring for a delivering mom and her baby in labor, you might also end up helping with neonatal resuscitation, in the OR as a scrub or circulator, in PACU recovering a fresh post op, in triage dealing with anything from rule out rupture/labor to yeast infections, to preterm labor and obstetrical emergencies. If you work in an LDRP you will also care for postpartum couplets, which is a lot like med/surg lite.
And as a new grad, you aren't losing any skills by starting in any specialty. You can only gain skills. Don't take this negatively, but as a new grad you don't really have any skills to lose. For instance I don't know the first thing about caring for a patient on a ventilator, because I have never had to. I may have seen or cared for a few in nursing school under the guidance of other nurses, but in no way would I have ever said "I can take care of vent pts because I learned that in school." I am sure I could learn how to if I picked up a job in ICU, but they wouldn't expect me to know how when I started and they would teach me. Any knowledge you become rusty on or skills you feel like you didn't use much in L&D will be learned on whatever floor you end up on next. That's why they have orientation.
