Offbeat Mama

This weekend while I was at lunch with some friends Saturday afternoon a very random but intriguing conversation came about.  We were speaking of the announcement of a co-workers pregnancy and a discussion of the various birthing centers in the area my friend Allyn, mentioned that she has recently been reading about women choosing to eat their placenta after the birth of their child.  Immediately when she said this my reactions was, "Omg that is absolutely disgusting!" The image that immediately popped in to my head was of a woman with a bowl of her placenta and a spoon going to town like it was a bowl of cereal or ice cream. We continued to discuss how this did seem strange to all of us, but apparently the health benefits were great.  This morning I logged in to facebook and had a message from Allyn with an attached article from Offbeat Mama.  I hesitantly decided to go ahead and give it a shot and to my amazement women are actually doing this!! And the health benefits for the mother and child are phenomenal! I was still in a little bit of shock and decided to google some more information on this concept.  While I am not currently pregnant, ever been pregnant, or plan to be pregnant anytime in the near future I find this fascinating.  Everyone who knows me knows that being a mother is part of my life plan, so why not develop a plan now? While googling this topic I found that there are many ways women are choosing to ingest their placenta, some seem to be much more "hard to swallow" for me than others.  It's also interesting that this just isn't a fad here in the United States it's been practiced in countries for centuries because of the health benefits. 

• In parts of Indonesia, the Czech Republic and Morocco, new mothers once believed eating the placenta guarantees future fertility.
• Chinese women thought a bite of dried placenta would speed up labor.
• Once women in Hungary had tired of the whole child-bearing business, they believed that by burning the placenta and placing the ashes in their husband’s drink, he’d soon be shooting blanks. 

 Other known health benefits include:

• Increased breast milk production
• lowered risk of hemorrhage
• increased nutritional benefits (for mother and baby)
• Decreased chances of suffering from postpartum depression

To me this is amazing!  There really are health benefits to eating the goo that comes out of your vagina after you give birth to your new child! And the risks associated with doing so are pretty much non existent.  The only risk I can find is if you chose to eat the placenta of another woman prior to birth to help with your labor and etc you run the risk of catching infections from the placenta donor.  Now here comes the good part... the most common ways women are eating their placenta... Most common is actually drying out the placenta and encapsulating it like the woman in the above article chose to and taking the pills several times a day until they are gone.  Other ways including drying the placenta out and adding it as a supplement to meals (like it's a spice) and the one way I am not personally down with is a placenta smoothie (very similar to eating it like a bowl of ice cream... except it's more like a milkshake). 

I know this is a very very strange blog topic but I was and still am so fascinated by the idea I had to share the facts with someone so I chose to use my blog.

So now I have a question for you, my readers ( I think here are only 2 of you haha but anyway). Have you ever heard of women doing this? Do you personally know anyone who has? Have you?  What was their/your experience with this?  If you haven't done this or this is the first you have heard of this would you ever consider doing it?