After my first home birth, I bought a DIY kit from Placenta Benefits to process my placenta into capsules to take postpartum. Awhile after that, I "friended" the Placenta Benefits page on Facebook. My sister sent me an inquisitive message, "Carrie is now Friends with Placenta Benefits." Yeah, that DOES sound strange. But the best kind of friends are those with whom you have placenta benefits! I didn't process my own placenta after that birth. A good friend of mine- a friend with placenta benefits, if you will- offered to do it for me. "Buy the kit (which was like $60ish), and I'll do it for you," she said. That way, I didn't have to pay the $275 to have someone come and do it for me. And I knew it was completely unrealistic to expect that in Day 1 postpartum I'd be up, in the kitchen, with a few hours on my hands to properly process my placenta.
So she did it all- took my placenta home, steamed it, sliced it, dehydrated it, ground it, and encapsulated it for me. I was super grateful, and I loved taking my placenta pills.
You get A LOT of pills from one placenta. So many that you'll have some left over well after the postpartum period when you take them. When it came time to have my next baby at home, I had plenty of placenta pills leftover from my previous delivery. So I had my midwife put the placenta in my freezer and figured I'd get to it in a few months.
Why bother to process it at all if I had plenty of pills, you ask? I have this thing with wasting. I hate, hate, hate, to see something useful going to waste. My food scraps go my chickens. I sweep out the ashes in my fireplace and add them to my compost pile. Useful food cartons go in our "junk" box to be used later in kid crafts. And lots of recycling goes on. So to just throw away something like my placenta- something that my body made and that provided life to my baby- is just unthinkable to me!
Waste not, want not. We take it pretty seriously around here.
Anyway, so my baby was about 6 months old or so and I thought, "I'm going to get to that placenta." So I took it out of the freezer and let it thaw in a bowl in the fridge for a few days. Then I went to get it out and process it. I took it out the fridge and uncovered it. It was a bowl full of blood with the placenta in the middle of it. I couldn't believe how bright and red the blood was. And I knew I couldn't do it. I just couldn't. I'm not a squeamish person, I'm not a wimp, and I always thought I could do absolutely anything. But I could not do this. And I knew it the second I looked at the bowl full of blood.
But there was no way I was just going to bag it up and toss it in the trash, either. So I took it out in my backyard and buried it next to a dwarf pomegranate tree. My "waste not, want not" obsession was satisfied- that little tree would be nourished for years in a way no fertilizer ever could- and I still had plenty of pills, so I was good.
How on earth did my friend do it, I wondered later? She not only processed a placenta, but it wasn't even her own! And she had told me afterwards how she had really enjoyed doing it. Wow. I'm still in awe of my placenta benefits-friend!
I'll refer you to Placenta Benefits' website to fish through their great info. Frankly, there's NOT a lot of hard core, scientific research about the validity of this practice. It just hasn't been studied in a comprehensive, scientific way yet. Hopefully that will change in the future as this becomes more popular. There are plenty of anecdotal experiences, however, and many, many women have reported fewer baby blues, less anxiety, increased lactation, and better moods while using the pills. Honestly, it COULD be a placebo effect. Or not. I don't know. Science doesn't know (yet). But even if it was just a placebo effect, I think it's worth doing. New moms need all the help we can get- and if that comes in the form of a placenta pill, so be it.
At the VERY least, you'd be giving yourself a much-needed boost of an amazingly bioavailable form of iron. And, after your last trimester and then the delivery, and postpartum bleeding, putting some iron back into your system would do any new mom a lot of good. (Just FYI, iron is the only nutrient for which your baby truly acts as a 'parasite'- it takes what it needs and you get the leftovers. This happens primarily in your final trimester. For all other nutrients, your body makes YOU the priority, and baby gets what's leftover. Breastmilk has hardly any iron in it at all, so your baby's body stores the iron it took from you in your 3rd trimester, and it lasts about 4-6 months- at which time you'll start introducing other foods (that have iron in them) into her or his diet. Pretty amazing, isn't it? The beautiful orchestration of it all- it's perfect!) So odds are pretty good that you'll be iron deficient in those first few postpartum weeks. And eating an iron-rich organ that your body made would be a smart move for any new mom.
So what am I doing this time around? My amazing friend...(with placenta benefits) and I live in different states now and I have NO pills. So actually I will be forking out the $275 or whatever it is to have it done for me. My midwife's assistant will take my placenta home and deliver it to the 'placenta lady'. She'll process it and deliver it back to me encapsulated and ready to go.
And just for another look at human maternal placentophagy (the technical term. Log that away in your brain for a future trivia game), read TIME's Joel Stein's humorous experience with it.
And here's a few more interesting websites about it (but not as funny as Joel Stein's commentary):
Bon Appetit!!!!
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