Placenta, anyone?

Modern day America is a far cry from the Circle of Life that Mufasa taught Simba many moons ago. Birth, love, aging and death are compartmentalized physically and emotionally – we have maternity wards, end-of-life facilities and grief counseling instead of multi-generational households and multi-day wakes. Billion dollar industries subcontract care for our most humanizing stages of life. A village rarely raises a child – unless the village is Nickelodeon’s Kidzone.

I’m 28 years old and have never seen a baby born or a person die, except on television. It’s bizarre to have ‘experienced’ so many important milestones of existence exclusively virtually. A hundred years ago not only would many of my siblings probably have died (I definitely would have considering the number of childhood illnesses I endured), my mom had a 1/3 chance of dying with every pregnancy, and living on a farm entailed constant interaction with natural cycles.

Urbanites suffer particularly from this cycle-dissociation-disorder, hence the back to the land-esque movement around our life-stages. How can we better connect with our intrinsic evolutionary drives within this technocratic, sterilized society? So we strive to connect with our animal selves, whether through hippy love-fests and shamanism or hunting and ultimate fighting.

Which brings me to the word of the day: Placenta. Why did Pee-Wee’s Playhouse never mention this nutrient-rich birth-sac? It’s considered a sign of good luck if babies are born with the placenta on their heads. In Victorian England, these “cauls” were sought after by seafaring folk who believed they prevented drowning.

Ever since reading that David Copperfield’s caul was sold “at the low price of fifteen guineas” I’ve been fascinated with this “piece of membrane that can cover a newborn’s head.” As my undergrad English teacher told a disbelieving class, “I’ve flown with mine my entire life, dried out in a wooden box, and I haven’t drowned yet.” Specious yet somehow convincing? Where’s my caul at? Kind of reminds me of biodynamic birthing – maybe we can bury it in the backyard with some cow manure and then spray it on the baby for added vitality next spring?

“Jessy, what does this have to do with our societal disconnect from natural cycles?” you’re asking – fair enough. Placentas, baby! We can reclaim our pure bodily essences, despite living in an impure society. Talking to my sister this week we started discussing birthing strategies – conventional on your back in stirrups with an epidural fluorescent lights and a video camera, versus crawling around in a hot-tub making animal noises while your dula chants quietly in the corner. But once you pop that multi-pound meat sack out of your canal, the fun has just begun.

Because what to do with the nutrient-rich birth bits your body expels? One person’s biohazard bin is another’s healthy snack! That’s right, you can pay someone to turn your placenta into after-birth pills (as covered by ABC’s Placenta Pills to Prevent Postpartum Depression). Despite the lack of studies on this practice’s effectiveness, placenta is coveted in many cultures for a variety of medicinal uses, including impotence and depression.

To quote my venerable sibling, “You can pay someone to come dehydrate your placenta and eat it in pill form, or in a raw smoothie but that’s nasty because it looks like brain-liver. But don’t worry, they come with all their own utensils, and you can have a little jerky-style taster. They bring their own dehydrator and cutting board and leave you with some placenta. Every other mammal does it, and it has lots of other wonderful benefits, but the placenta detoxifies everything and keeps all those toxins – and there are so many toxins out there. That was my boyfriend’s argument for why I shouldn’t eat my placenta – I was so all about it.”

So is this an example of getting back in touch with our natural cycles, or simply another clever way to outsource direct connection with our existential milestones? Is getting someone else to dehydrate and package your placenta as meaningful as frying it up yourself on a three-stone hearth? And what does it say about our relationship with the natural world that we’ve introduced so many chemicals into the world in the last half-century  (≥ 70,000, most of which have never been tested) that breast milk could be considered toxic?

The toxic body burdens that most people live with are hundreds of times higher than our parents or grandparents, and babies are being born with dozens to hundreds of chemicals in their tiny little fragile bodies. In addition to flame-retardants, PCBs and dioxins, they’ve also found self-perpetuating insecticide from Genetically Engineered food in 93% of unborn fetuses (in Europe, and they’re usually better off than we are!). And scientific evidence keeps piling up that these toxic loads are impacting other species far more than humans, with possibly existential threats when it comes to honeybee colony collapse and links with common pesticides. I was excited that a recent study purportedly linked autism with high-fructose corn syrup, but that seems to be unfortunately opportunistic reporting (like we need another reason to hate GMO laden nutrient-void HFCS).

So, to placenta or not to placenta? That’s the question. (Actually I think my dad would say that’s absolutely not a question, and I probably have too much time on my hands and should go work on my finals, especially since my uterus will probably never have to face this conundrum). But it’s intriguing how society continues to seek connection to our ancestry, through ever more technologically dependent and bizarre constructs (seriously, the dula brings her own dehydrator?)

This debate is reminiscent of an intriguing Slate article my mom sent me, A French Feminist Fights the New Feminine Mystique, (maybe it’s thinking about babies that makes my family so prevalent in this post? Shout out to Madame de Farge, don’t feel left out!) modern society is using childcare ‘best practices’ to subversively oppress women.

Apparently with the rise of feminism there was a correlated increase in time-intensive childcare practices requiring mothers constantly interact with these screaming poop machines to ‘prove’ our innate mothering abilities.

As the author writes, “I suppose it could be a coincidence that lengthy breast-feeding and attachment parenting that interferes heavily with maintaining a career came into style right as it became passé to pressure women to downplay their ambitions for the sake of men, but it just seems highly unlikely. One thing I do know is that the more conservative women of my acquaintance don’t feel the same pressure to breast-feed until their kids are talking or to keep their kids by their side at all times, even bedtime. It seems that if you live in social circles where it’s simply expected that you curtail your professional ambitions and do most of the domestic work so as to avoid emasculating your husband, the psychic need to create elaborate parenting theories to achieve the same result—woman at home, tied to the kitchen—simply vanishes. Strange coincidence, indeed.“

As someone raised by a staunch feminist who forsook her law degree to take care of her children, this article struck a chord. What does best practices parenting mean – how much should (mothers) “self-abnegate” in order to excel? And does eating your placenta connect you to natural cycles and our ancestors, or “demote new mothers to four-legged animals”? The answer is in the eye of the beholder (or birth membrane as it were…), but it’s clear that with all our modernity humanity continues to struggle to find a balance for normative gender and developmental roles as a society and as smaller family units.

Would you eat it? Have you? Smoothie or pill? Inquiring minds (well, mine anyway) want to know…

2 thoughts on “Placenta, anyone?

  1. My parents buried my placenta under a rhododendron which bloomed exactly a year later on my birthday. The saved my umbilical cord and dried it out and wrapped it around a chopstick looking thing which I have at my house. Apparently, it was a native american tradition to do that, and give it to your kid when they left home, literally, “cutting the cord”…of course they forgot to give me mine until they found it in the safety deposit box 6 or 7 years after I left home. But now I have this weird thing that used to be part of me and my mom too. I can’t throw it away, but ew.

    • How did you get to be so lucky? Do you have any plans for your placenta if/when the time comes?

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