Placentophagy, or the practice of ingesting the placenta after giving birth, has been inching its way into the mainstream. Animals do it, and mothers have been offering testimony that eating the nutrient-rich placenta can have health benefits, including regulating hormones that may cause postpartum depression. Granted, no empirical data exists to prove that this is true—but that hasn’t stopped some mothers from adopting the “what does science know about my body/my child” approach (a philosophy that has yielded less-than-stellar results in other health debates).
Still, no evidence has surfaced showing that placenta-eating causes any harm, so for now it remains a harmless endeavor—and one ripe for media commentary. Take a fringe health pseudo-trend and add a journalist’s personal experience, and you have Joel Stein’s witty Time magazine account of just how the mechanics of eating a placenta go down. Writes Stein:
When the placenta did come out, Cassandra, dazed from 21 hours of labor, somehow made sure the nurses delivered it to us in a flat plastic container, which I put into an ice-filled Monsters vs Aliens cooler I brought….
In a fog, I drove the placenta home, where I wrapped the container in a bag and wrapped that bag in a bag and wrapped that bag in every remaining bag we had in the house.
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Some expectant parents are so excited to see their new baby, they just can’t bear to wait nine months. Soon they may not have to, thanks to designer Jorge Lopes of London’s Royal College of Art, who has started making life-size models of unborn babies based on MRI and ultrasound images. ABC News tells us:
“I think we’re at the beginning of a new science, really,” said Stuart Campbell, who heads the obstetrics and gynecology department at King’s College London. “It’s the sort of technique that in the future could be done in a matter of hours. So that the couple could have a model in their hands in a few hours.”
Lopes can create models at various points throughout a pregnancy and has also done models of twins. “It’s amazing to see [a parent's] face when they can hold the models, when they can understand very well the size, the scale,” he said, holding up one of the models. “Something like this is only 12 weeks. It’s very nice to hold this, ‘Oh, this is your son.’”
Some say the models could help parents bond with baby before he or she is born.
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In the past, an expectant mother who wanted to know the gender of her unborn baby had to wait for a sonogram 20 weeks into her pregnancy. But now an at-home test can determine a baby’s sex only 10 weeks in, with 78 to 80 percent accuracy, according to IntelliGender, the test’s creator.
When we asked the company’s rep exactly how the test worked, we were told what we pretty much already knew: It’s an analysis of urine in which chemicals react with hormones to indicate the gender of the baby. It takes about 10 minutes for the urine sample to turn either orange (for a girl) or green (for a boy). Interestingly, recent sexual activity can yield a false “boy” result.
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Doctors have discovered that a 27-year-old British woman has a double womb. Not only that, she also has two cervixes and two vaginas. Having two sets of reproductive organs, a condition known as uterus didelphys, may sound bizarre, but doctors say it affects as many as one in 1,000 women.
Lindsay Hasaj never suspected she was doubly-endowed, and neither did her husband or any of the doctors she had visited in her 27 years of life. Uterus didelphys occurs during embryonic development, when the two halves of the uterus, each attached to a fallopian tube, fail to fuse together. From the outside, women with uterus didelphys look completely normal. Doctors performing pelvic exams might not even notice, because, as one doctor explained, it’s like walking blindfolded into a tent separated with a tarp down the middle.
Hasaj was finally diagnosed after she had a sonogram for her pregnancy (which is in her right uterus). Only afterwards did Hasaj connect her condition with the problems she’d always had in using tampons.
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In the category of “conclusions we can’t believe needed to be reached,” Australian researchers who studied 299 women over eight years—including during their pregnancies—found that they were no mentally worse for wear after bearing children. Neither pregnancy nor motherhood had any detrimental effect on each mother’s cognitive capacity, said Helen Christensen, director of the Center for Mental Health Research at Australian National University.
Christensen says previous studies may have linked cognitive deficits to pregnancy because they were comparing pregnant women with other non-pregnant women. In this study, they were able to compare a woman’s mental capacity to herself, by measuring it before, during, and after her pregnancy.
The researchers did find, however, that the mothers were slightly less well-educated than women of the same age who didn’t have children (the study followed a total of 2,500 women’s lives in detail). Future studies will reveal whether this small difference, attributed to an interruption in education, will give mothers a long-term disadvantage—although there is indication that delaying motherhood increases earnings.
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Over the past century, the shackles of gender conformity have been getting looser and looser. More girls are becoming engineers and CEOs; more boys are becoming nurses and stay-at-home dads; a woman is a serious U.S. presidential candidate. And now men can become pregnant. (more…)
