Okay,
I'm trying to type this post with a straight face. I know this topic
has been out there for a long while ... I think I first heard about it
a few years ago and repressed the memory of it. It's come back above
ground recently through the media and still totally freaks me out. I
find it amazing that a woman sued a hospital to get her placenta so she
could eat it. And I just visited a discussion thread on mothering.com
to see what other moms are saying about the suggestion that eating your
placenta cures you of PPD. I'm still freaked out....
So there are women who actually roast their placentas in the oven
shortly after they've given birth. They wait till it's dried out,
carefully strip away the membranes (are you feeling sick yet?), chop it
up into bite-size pieces, pound them into powder and pour the powder
into empty capsules to "swallow without being able to taste it." There
are other placenta recipes, such as dropping it into a blender with
your favorite smoothie mix (don't forget to add extra strawberries to
disguise the red color of the blood), or even mixing it with vegetable
juice till it tastes like a bloody mary (no pun intended!).
I even came across a site that shows a woman holding her placenta
and describing it as looking like a "boneless beef round steak." She
does offer other options in lieu of the Silence of the Lambs routine,
such as making a "placenta print as a keepsake," or to "use it to
fertilize your garden."
I don't know, this is all just a bit too crunchy for me. I can't
imagine a "cure" for PPD looking like this. The assertion is that the
placenta is filled with hormones that helped sustain the pregnancy, and
if the mother ingests it, she will replace the hormones she has lost
and avoid suffering from PPD. One question I haven't yet seen addressed
is: once a placenta is dried out, would the hormones even still be
chemically active/viable?
But nevermind that -- is this the kind of PPD "cure" that women
have hoped for? Are we really so desperate to accept something so
unbelievably icky??