Placenta Uses/Projects 🤓
*PLACENTA USES AFTER BIRTH*
Everyone KNOWS I love a good placenta .
I know there are many people who don't, but placentas are absolutely amazing......enabling a baby to grow in utero, keeping it nourished, oxygenated and safe from bacteria, viruses and toxins to the best of its abilities.
No placentas, no people.
It is the only truly disposable organ!!
And dispose of it we do, mostly.
But there are many other things that can be done with placentas other than throw it away if you wish to acknowledge and honour it a little more.......here are some/most of the possibilties:
1. Look at it and take pictures......if you had a midwife at your birth, they will offer to check the placenta for completeness and health after your baby's birth, even after caesarean sections. You can request to see how they do this, and to have the structure and features of the placenta explained to you, you can even explore it yourself if you want, of course!
2. You can make art with it.......placenta prints, casts (absolutely gorgeous!!), dry out the membranes (I know of someone who made a drum with theirs I think, though it would be super fragile) or cord keepsakes. You can even wait for a few years and keep your placenta in the freezer so your child who the placenta belongs to can do placenta prints with it (this is what I did, and you can see my daughter with the print she made of her own placenta….also attached a pic of another sibling placenta session I attended). For a print, you simply turn the placenta vessel/fetal side up, arrange the cord nicely, and bring a sturdy piece of paper or canvas and lay it on the placenta (dont try to do it the other way round and attempt to bring the placenta to the paper......one word, MESSY ), and you can also use paints on the placenta to make you prints less bloody, more colourful......cord keepsakes are made by shaping the cord and putting it into a dehydrator until solid and dry.
Casts are a little more tricky, but many people who provide placenta services are happy to make a cast for you, and of course you can experiment yourself!
3. Lotus it! You can simply keep your placenta attached to your baby until it releases from your little ones belly button. The placenta is usually salted to ‘preserve’ it, and no, it’s does not smell......many people feel this has spiritual benefits and it certainly keeps you close to your little one in the early days.
4. You can honour it by burial, in your garden or in a large pot......a meaningful plant can be put over it and enjoyed for years to come, this can of course be done after lotusing
5. It can be ingested in many different ways, and this is defintely very very popular nowadays. There is little evidence for placentophagy, but people who ingest their placentas report a huge amount of anecdotal benefits, and tbf, most mammals do eat their placentas. The options are simply cooking it in a stew/dish of your choosing, raw smoothies (don't worry, its not a meaty placenta sludge with the whole placenta in ONE smoothie, it's just a thumb sized piece of placenta plopped into a nice fruit smoothie ), encapsulating it so it can be taken in capsule form, chocolates made with placenta powder, homeopathic remedies, tinctures......there is also the option for skincare/balms.....there is room for creativity!
6. Placenta jewellery is a thing!! You can send pieces of your placenta off to be cured into resin jewellery........usually the piece of placenta is dried, and then mixed with resin and sometimes other decorative bits like glitter to be made into rings, beads etc. You can also have your baby's cord stump cast in silver.......
So yeah, you have OPTIONS. You can choose what suits your family best. I suppose there are still quite a few stigmas attached to many of the above options, but hey, you do you no-one is going to MAKE anyone eat any placenta (I hope ).