PSA: The placenta is cool

Most people don't give much thought to the placenta. To our society, it's nothing but medical waste, to be disposed of quickly and quietly along with the other messy parts of birth. It's really a pretty amazing organ though!

The placenta is the only "disposable" organ made (take that boys! women make organs at will!) The name placenta comes from the Latin for "cake", and in some languages they are called "mother cake". The placenta really is the first "mother" of the fetus - it provides for the baby while in the womb - filtering nutrients and oxygen from you to the baby, and sending waste back through to you from the baby.

After birth, people do all sorts of things with the placenta. Typically, hospitals dispose of them the same way they do other medical waste - by incineration (though some sell them to companies - see below). Sometimes families keep them to bury and plant a tree over - the tree grows with the child. Others make "placenta prints" by cleaning and using paints to "stamp" paper or some other medium - sort of like a belly cast from the inside. A few even prefer to keep the baby attached to the placenta until the umbilical cord detaches completely on its own (after a few days) - called a lotus birth. Once the the cord detaches the baby has a normal belly button - no stump! Pretty neat.

Almost every mammal species (except humans) eat their placenta after birth. Even herbivores! This is most likely to provide nutrition, though the hormones in the placenta (prostaglandins and oxytocin) can help the uterus to contract down and aid in the production of milk. A small minority of human cultures ingest their own placenta, but it's pretty rare. Among westerners who do it, often they do it for perceived medicinal benefits, such as the belief that it can prevent post partum depression and prevent hemmorage. In China it is used for medicinal purposes as well.

People will prepare the the placenta in many ways for ingestion, from drying and encapsulating it, to adding a few raw bits to a smoothie, to simply placing a small piece under the tongue after birth to absorb the hormones. Less often it's prepared in typical food fashion, but since it's an organ, unless you are a fan of liver (I'm not) it probably wouldn't be too palatable. It is not typically done for the nutritional value amongst those who do ingest it, so much as for the medicinal/hormonal benefits, as the modern western diet obviously contains a very balanced diet. It does provide a lot of nutrients though, at a time when women are being completely depleted.

Obviously, ingesting their own placenta is not something most people consider doing. I wonder though, if any of those people have looked at the ingredients of their face cream lately! Check this out, from "Birth: The Surprising History of How We are Born":

"Although many western hospitals today incinerate the organ as medical waste, some maternity facilities send them to researchers or cosmetic makers. Between 1975 and 1992, for example, placentas from 282 British hospitals, weighin 360 tons, were collected by Merieux UK Ltd., a subsidiary of a French pharmaceutical company.

"We use placentas from normal, healthy births only. Placenta is an extremely valuable and rare resource which, instead of being wasted, is used to make pharmaceutical products," Michael O'Gorman, a Merieux manager, told he London Times in 1992 when Harrods was selling a 20 GBP vial of RoC face cream - a major brnad - with human placenta that supposedly moisturized and regenerated the skin...

..."In 2001, dozens of cosmetic companies informed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of their use of human placenta. Even Frederic Fekkai on Rodeo Drive has offered Oscar week European Plasma facials. A key ingredient: afterbirth."

Perhaps that doesn't phase people considering some of the other ingredients in skin products. I guess if given the choice I'd rather ingest my own placenta than smear someone elses all over my face!

So what will we do with the placenta? I'm not really sure, to be honest. In addition to immediate breastfeeding (which helps the uterus clamp down) and Charlotte's bag of tricks - which includes the drug pitocin - I am keeping the placenta in the back of my mind as another emergency medical treatment for post-partum hemmorage. No one participating in my birth is familiar with any type of placenta preparation/encapsulation, and I doubt I'm going to want to be doing any preparation, so more than likely we'll dispose of it after inspecting DomerBaby's first "mother".