Friday, July 3, 2009

Placenta For Dinner?

I read an article on the Time website about placenta encapsulation. It is a hilarious story about one husbands point of view on his wife's ideas to encapsulate her placenta and ingest it for the nutrients. Read here and tell me what you think.

2 comments:

Emily said...

It definitely kept my attention. I remember seeing a placenta on video at our child birth class and thinking "what the H ?!?". And I remember asking our instructor, "are all placenta's that big?" And then I got to see my own placenta after the birth of my first daughter, thanks to my lovely sister-n-law who took 50+ pictures of just it because she, too, was in awe of the sight of it. Loved the video of the process of cooking the placenta and the humor of Joel. My question to you as a doula is......if I were to encapsulate my placenta after my hopefully future next delivery......would it still be beneficially, seeing that I have never experienced postpartum or lack of milk supply (I'm a super human cow when it comes to milk production, ha) with my first 2 deliveries?

Hannah said...

Well, I don't know a lot about encapsulation. I have had some clients do it though. There are some postpartum doulas that do it for you. I know that the placenta, as gross as it sounds, has a lot of nutrients in it. From what I understand, the placenta retains vital nutrients from pregnancy and continues to pass to you and baby by encapsulation and then through breastfeeding.

The placenta is fascinating. It really is like an organ. It is amazing to see it as it comes out and know that it provided the nourishment your baby needed to survive in utero.