:: drops dead laughing ::
I do believe you might have WhyNot mixed up with someone else.
Nullpersona’s oddly poetic way of saying almost nothing clearly comprehendable doesn’t lead to good answers around here. Oly’s almost as poetic answers don’t seem to be helping although his/her thinking is IMO mostly spot-n.
The placenta *itself *doesn’t do any of the things asserted in post #35. The OP is fundamentally confused about that.
The placenta is (almost) a dumb pipeline connecting the fetus to the mother. The *mother *does all that stuff in post #35. To a first approximation the placenta simply carries the resulting fluids & solids and dissolved gases back and forth between fetus & mother.
It sounds to me like the OP is angling after an artificial mother. Imagine that shortly after pregnancy & implantation we unplug the fetus/placenta system from the Mom & put it into an appropriately designed artificial “womb + mother” machine. The pregnancy can the proceed to term with no annoyance to the mother.
As well this device could be used in the event of significantly premature births, wherein the fetus is just barely viable in a modern NICU environment. We could unplug the placenta at the mother end and plug it into the machine to let the fetus have another month or three of normal development to the conventional term. This would certainly be a boon compared to contemporary NICU practice.
The other alternative is the OP has invested the placenta with some magical powers and somehow believes it could serve a useful purpose in a fully developed and conventionally delivered infant. If so, this is pure woo fantasy and undeserving of further intelligent comment.
ETA: The OP’s last post, #40, wasn’t here when I started. I now vote unequivocally for Door #2: fantasy woo. I’m out.
The preferable alternative is a newborn, no placenta required.
I can see wanting to come up with something along the lines of “artificial wombs”, but in order to get the same result you’d get from a regular womb, that is, a full-term, healthy baby. But once you have a full-term baby, he needs the placenta like any of us needs butterfly wings on our eyebrows.
I don’t know, placentas don’t wake you up in the middle of the night screaming and crying because they need to be fed. You don’t need to pay for them to go to college. And they also don’t steal money from your purse when they’re 20 year old washed up dope fiends trying to score.
Exactly yes, to all of this. If the placenta could be put to use in an artificial womb, that might be interesting, exciting, and a real cause for celebration, if it produced better outcomes for premature babies, or even allowed for the infertile to grown their babies outside the womb entirely.
The rest is silly. The rest is like wishing we could have our mailbox with us everywhere, at all times. The mailbox does nothing really. I could carry around a mailbox and have no mail. The mailbox is merely the site of exchange where the mail carrier leaves my exciting packages from Amazon and I take them out. It’s attached to the house, but if the mail carrier doesn’t come, there’s nothing in the mailbox to interest me. Detaching it from the house and carrying it around doesn’t change that.
It has nothing to do with fear. It has a bit to do with understanding the structure and functions of the placenta.
Nobody wants to have a placenta, though. Not by itself. It actually is something that can happen: a pregnancy where you get a placenta and amniotic sac, but no baby. The morning sickness without the hope.
I can’t believe you’re taking me seriously :dubious:
Why do you want to prevent its consumption? The role of the placenta is to nurture the fetus. In most mammals, after it has done, that, it is eaten by the mother, and thus it indirectly continues to nurture the fetus. Seems fine to me to use it in other ways that actually help people, rather than just throw it out.
I apologize for kicking the hornets nest with that last post.
My humor is an innate taste, I’ve been told.
As for the rest, it breaks down into 3 sections:
What the placenta does now.
What the placenta could do with individual containment.
What the placenta could do with ubiquitous environment.
The placenta handles all logistics from shortly after gestation, to amputation.
As I have said multiple times, this is ALL conjecture, excepting a few examples of concrete evidence.
One such example is a child who lived for 3 weeks past their ideal birth date, without breathing or eating anything, supported by the placenta.
I asked “Could the placenta continue to function?”
Not “In your opinion, is cutting off baby body parts a-ok?”
Recognizing the placenta as a (“permanent”) part of the human body, is a way of assisting to persuade the cessation of amputation/consumption/etc.
If the placenta could continue to function, I guess I assumed you all would stop eating them.
I could be wrong, I guess I never considered that.
If the placenta cannot continue to function, then I would not argue against it’s consumption in this thread.
Does that make sense?
If it is a human body part, it would not be something you would want to eat, or put in pills, or anything like that, right?
Maybe people would eat them anyway, but can we at least find out if placentae have possible further function in them, before grabbing the ketchup?(humor, kinda)
You’re still borderline nonsensical, whether intended humorously or not.
AFAIK placenta eating is not practiced in any current human culture. So why do you keep bringing that up?
And you said this
which is simply wrong. The fetus was supported for 3 weeks by the mother’s body. The placenta was a dumb hose which carried the vital goods the last few inches between the two bodies. Without the attached mother the placenta is useless.
Repeat after me: “The placenta is a dumb piece of hose and nothing more!”
It is not dumb, and it does some useful things… but it is a built-in temporary organ, not expected to last past birth. It is formed from fetal tissue, but it is very intricately connected to the uterus and maternal blood system to live and function properly separate of that (at least with our current technology).
I think what is the key here is that the idea of a built in, temporary organ is something that Nullpersona cannot get behind. But it is, and that is part of what makes it interesting. There is nothing wrong with it, and there is nothing wrong with letting it atrophy and die when its job is done.
Don’t listen to LSL Guy, placenta-that’s all my first wife called me, too.
Respect the placenta! It’s an impressive organ, doing what it does and then naturally entering senescence. Not as impressive as a kidney or liver, true. Nowhere as neat as a pancreas, but still meriting respect. It’s more vital than a spleen, or a gall bladder. The species cannot survive without it.
I’ve handled a LOT of placentas in my day; having delivered hundreds of babies. I’ve had to go searching for missing pieces of them in the uterus, peel recalcitrant ones off the uterine wall, tug steadily and firmly on them to get them delivered properly in some cases. Remarkably tough as old tree roots when the need arises. They’re like spacesuits for fetuses. 
Even so, their time is ephemeral; they have their season, then they detach and wither. Yearning for an immortal placenta is like longing for old oak leaves to never die or fall; it is a misplaced yearning for eternal life, rather than for renewal in a new life.
Now you’ve made me go all poetical, dammit.
I can’t believe you’ve actually torn a placenta, er, limb from limb, Qadgop the Mercotan. The inhumanity of it all.
Love the spacesuits for fetuses though. Surely there’s a commercial application in here somewhere.
I was deliberately overstating my case a bit for emphasis. I bow to the wisdom of our experts. Thank you.
Our OP reminds me a bit of the occasional character we get who’s in deep mourning for his long lost foreskin. *Alas and if only we respected foreskins for their mighty and supernatural powers. *Etc., etc until banned.
Has anybody asked the OP what the benefit is to keeping a placenta attached indefinitely?
Yes. It would bring about world peace.
Yes, we all like peas. And how do we get them?
With your placenta ya’ big dummy. The one they callously took from you lo so many years ago. If only you still had it. :smack:
I like the cut of your jib, LSLGuy!