There are so many things wrong with what this woman is saying. I think the main thing I’m bothered by is that she is personifying her son’s placenta. I guess that and the sentence where she ponders whether or not to sleep with the placenta.
I just think - if crazy Mary from http://www.maryromantic.com ever gave birth (again), I think this is how she’d do it. With that Peter Pan guy as the father, of course.
I always thought the people who wanted to keep the placentas in order to make soaps and shampoos out of it were kind of wacky, but this is just plain icky.
Wait. If these people are doing this because they are thinking that the placenta and the baby come from the same cell, why did that one woman refer to the placenta as “she?” Shouldn’t it be “he?”
I can see where it might be nice not to immediately cut the cord – give the baby a few minutes to get used to the whole being outside Mom deal – but good Lord, this is going too far. It’s a PLACENTA people, it’s not another baby.
If you really wanted to do right by your placenta (now there’s a sentence I never thought I would type), you would eat it after giving birth. Good for you, with all those vitamins and minerals and stuff, ya know.
My god, you found Mango Mama’s site for me again! She moved it and I never got around to searching for it. She’s a flake, but some of her ideas are damned interesting and she’s not all wacko. She’s also pretty cute, if I remember right.
But back to the OP. Yup, I’ve heard of this. You salt the placenta and wrap it in a diaper and keep it near the baby for a while without cutting the cord. It’s definitely not to my tastes, but it’s a real (albeit uncommon) practice. When I first thought about it, I thought it was bizarre, but for some reason it seems less oddball to me now. Not that you’d ever, ever catch me doing it.
I guess part of its slight appeal to me is that it is the ultimate rejection of our modern culture’s troubling regard of childbirth as “gross.” It’s not gross. Well, yes it is, but I wish I didn’t feel that way.
And superglue instead of sutures is old news, medically. Mainstream.
Yeah, I knew about that (from personal experience, actually ).
But this example involved hardware store-variety superglue, a hairdryer, and…well, let’s just say that Mom always told me not to apply such things to that area of the body.
You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? But no. It’s not. I sent this to my sister when she was pregnant. She invited me over to dinner after she dropped the litter. I politely declined.
I know that cats and dogs eat the placentas of their babies after they’re born. And I’ve heard that there is a “trend” of making a stew of the placenta because if it nourished your baby, then it can nourish you as well!
Having read the site thoroughly, I can sorta get by with letting the thing drop off on its own, I guess, sorta. However, I do not see the logic in calling it “she”.
I also liked this part:
Not only do you have to let the placenta hang on there, but you have to make a bag for it - by HAND, and it has to be BEAUTIFUL.
Bad karma rains down on mothers who package their placenta in a store-bought, unattractive placenta bag.
Mainstream.
).