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A bizarre, squeamish story from Urbana this week: a filter screen at a water treatment plant caught three placentas and the Trib confirms, "at least one of them [is] human." According to Julie Pryde, head of the Champaign-Urbana Health District, the placentas don't pose a health threat and were most likely the result of a midwife not being aware of the proper disposal procedure for a placenta.
Three more lines of interest from the Trib story:
- "I said, 'Who the hell is Perez Hilton?' " said Urbana Police Lt. Bryant Seraphin, a Sugar Grove native, after someone reported the news had been posted on the gossip site.
- In Chicago, the sheer bulk of "material" handled — the regional wastewater plant in Stickney alone, said to be the largest in the world, processes more than a billion gallons per day—means that even if placentas were being discarded into the sewers, they'd likely never be noticed, said Jill Horist, spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.
- Rather than tossing the placenta after birth, [Jodi] Selander's site suggests burying it and planting a tree on the spot or even shaping the umbilical cord into a heart or wreath that, once dried, will leave "you with a lasting keepsake to remember this momentous time in your life."
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OK, Eeeewwww.
Placentas grow nicely in a shaded and moist environment; plant one accordingly.
Plant a tree, weird. Lasting dried keepsake, creepy. But you missed the part were the lady suggests that you EAT the placenta! Is the economy so bad that we are looking for protein in human afterbirth?
Also, interesting cognitive dissonance with confirmation that the placenta in the sewer (along with all of the other stuff in the sewer) does not pose a health risk and three sentences later there is an advocate for human consumption of the placenta.
I'm waiting for Stolpman to come up with the drink.
I think a nice placenta punch for the spring. Plan your births accordingly.
Or a tasty placenta smoothie/daquiri.
oh, i knew the jokes would be coming. i'm the office manager for a midwife and we share space with acupuncturists who specialize in acupuncture for pregnancy, fertility, childbirth and the like.
when one 'eats' a placenta, it's actually dried and prepared by an acupuncturist who is an herbalist or someone versed in chinese medicine. after it's dried, it's ground up and put into capsules, and swallowed just like any other pill. it's used to build the blood back up after giving birth, and has been done for many many years ...
and i don't even intend on having kids, so i'm not some big earth mother type. but when things work for thousands of years, i'm inclined to at least be open-minded.
Ritualistic sacrifice to the thunder god also worked for thousands of years. That doesn't mean I'm going to do it in pill form, or that I'm not going to make jokes about those who do.
In olden days, consuming ones placenta may have been, for some people, the only viable way to build your blood back up after giving birth.
Today, we don't need to do that...and I do lean towards the earth mother type as I did have a midwife to attend me.