Placenta tales

My oldest baby tucks her mobile phone into her handbag and heads off to the disco. Fourteen years ago she was still a bump under my jumper, attached by umbilical cord and placenta. The bump, the placenta, and I were booked in for a home birth but took a tour of the London hospital (I like back-up plans). We met another couple who were determined to give birth chanting on all fours and with yoga breathing (they didn’t; they had a caesarean) and to ritually bury the placenta under a sapling in East London’s Victoria park (they did).

The placenta (from the Latin for cake and the Greek plaokenta, meaning flat) is a dinnerplate sized, knotty-fleshed ephemeral organ that is rarely mentioned in polite, or indeed any, company in the West. Most mothers cannot even tell you what their placenta looks like; it is whisked away after birth to a communal bin and incineration. Yet Maori bury the placenta to emphasise the link between the baby and the earth. The Nepalese think of the placenta as the baby’s friend; Malaysian Orang Asli regard it as the baby’s older sibling. In Nigeria the Ibo conduct full funeral rites for what they see as the baby’s twin. Native Hawaiians traditionally plant the placenta with a tree, which can then grow alongside the child.

Placentophagia has a long history. Experts in traditional Chinese medicine have documented the practice for more than 2500 years. For a rather weird Western variant, a list of placenta recipes from the September 1983 edition of Mothering Magazine is doing the rounds on the web. Placenta lasagne, anyone?

Some hospitals still sell placentas in bulk for scientific research, or to cosmetics firms, where they are processed and later plastered on the faces of rich women. In the UK, babies are gently wiped dry, leaving some protective vermix clinging to the skin. In contrast, in eastern Europe vermix is scrubbed off the newborn’s skin with soap, water, and stiff brushes. The babies are then plonked—shocked, swaddled, and painfully pink—into communal nursery bassinets. This cruel practice and can lead to hypothermia.

As for that other East London placenta? I missed the burial in Victoria Park but went along the next day to relive the moment with our friends. We stood with our tiny babies in a hushed semicircle round a large empty hole in the flowerbed. “Perhaps you should have asked the park keeper first?” said one young mother helpfully. Deep down we all knew the more likely explanation. I can see them now, a bunch of rollicking local dogs, chasing each other past pensioners on park benches, their unbelievable prize tossed high.

Some placentas are born to run.