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Santa Monica Mom Regrets Eating Her Placenta
Human placenta via Shutterstock
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New mom Nancy Redd ate her placenta and lived to tell the tale on the New York Times' mommy blog.Why did she end up trying it in the first place? She explains that this sort of thing didn't seem so far-out here in Southern California where even actress January Jones gave it a shot:
As a first-time pregnant lady living in crunchy Santa Monica, Calif., next to a raw food restaurant and a seemingly oxymoronic homeopathic pharmacy, hiring a so-called celebrity placenta processor seemed to make sense.
So Redd hired a placenta processor who ground up the placenta with some "cleansing herbs" and put them into pills. Redd writes she felt "jittery and weird" after her first dose and after eight pills she entered "tabloid-worthy meltdown mode." Her husband suggested she lay off the pills and she said she seemed fine (if sort of sleepless like most new moms) once she stopped.The argument from the pro-placenta camp is that hey, animals do it, it's all-natural and they believe that the practice could help ward off the dreaded post-partum blues. That last reason—in addition to claims that placenta can do everything new moms ever wanted short of waking up with the baby in the middle of the night—is what convinced Redd to try. Looking back, she says this logic seems pretty specious to her.
GOOD Magazine explains that scientists can't really explain almost anything about placenta-eating: why new moms in most cultures don't eat it, why some cultures have a taboo against it, why some "crunchy" types in Los Angeles and New York (and we're sure some other places in between) think it's a good idea or whether it is a good idea.
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If you haven't lost your lunch by now and you're curious about how placenta gets turned into placenta pills, read on.
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