Placenta Encapsulation - Not Just For Hippies!

***DISCLAIMER: IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO SEE PICTURES OF PLACENTAS OR LEARN ABOUT THEM OR ANYTHING, PLEASE DO NOT READ THIS POST. I DON'T WANT TO MAKE ANYONE SICK, SO PLEASE, ONLY READ IF YOU CAN HANDLE IT :)***

When my midwife had her baby in November, I was thrilled to be able to encapsulate her placenta for her. My amazing friend on the other side of the continent sent me her instructions on how she went about the process, and I was amazed how easy the entire thing was.

Even though a lot of people don't know about ingesting the placenta after birth, it is slowly coming around. Just like homebirth and unassisted birth, the numbers are slowly climbing, and more women are learning the benefits of either cooking and eating, just eating, or encapsulating their placentas for use after birth.

When I was encapsulating her placenta, I found an amazing resource that helps show the benefits of encapsulating a placenta, plus it can hook you up with someone that does it in your area, which I think is really cool. Though, anyone can do it, it truly isn't hard, you just have to be able to stand the sight of placenta, the smell, cutting it, cooking it, and grinding it. Which to me is amazing.

On this site, they list the benefits of ingesting the placenta after birth. The list is truly phenomenal.

• Contain your own natural hormones
• Perfectly made for you
• Balance your system
• Replenish depleted iron
• Give you more energy
• Lessen bleeding postnatally
• Increase milk production
• Have a happier postpartum period
• Hasten return of your uterus to prepregnancy size
• Be helpful during menopause

(All from this page)

There is so much more that ingesting your placenta can do for you, but these are they key. For myself, anything to lessen the bleeding after giving birth and helps me stay happier by slowly dropping my hormones instead of a sudden drop is why I would take it. On that link, there are articles talking about each point in detail, I really encourage you to check it out and see for yourself why it is an amazing thing.

Since I encapsulated my midwife's placenta, I was recently able to encapsulate another one for a single mom where I live. Even my three year old daughter loves to help, and it is a great learning experience for both of us to be able to study the placenta and help women with their postpartum period, even if it is just this little bit.

Placentas come in all different shapes, sizes, colors, weights, everything. The first placenta I did was from a cesarean, so it wasn't completely whole, and this last one I did was from a vaginal birth and the placenta was intact and beautiful. I am always amazed the difference between them depending on how the birth went.

The encapsulation process that I do, for anyone interested you can google the raw hydration method (NOT the chinese method), for me it takes about 5-6 hours, but my oven doesn't go as low temperature wise as I wish it did, so mine cooks a bit faster though I keep the oven door cracked to help circulate the air.

When I start, I always love to look at the placenta. Check out the cord and the sacs, if there are any calcifications (spots where the placenta has started to age and doesn't work as well), if there are any problems with the placenta in any way. Now, I don't know much about them yet, and thankfully both the placentas I have done were very healthy, but I like to check anyway.

My favorite part of the entire process though, and this is just something that I do for the women, something my midwife taught me, is I do a placenta print for them before I start the actual process of encapsulating.

She uses ink pads (but I keep forgetting to go out and get some) so I just use craft paint, though it doesn't work as well as the ink pads.

The first placenta I did :)

The second placenta :)

I love how they end up looking like a tree, the tree of life per se, and if I had used ink they would have come out better. With ink, you can see the veins better, so it looks more like a tree with branches and such instead of just a big blob thing.

Ok, now we get to the good stuff :). If you are squeamish about placenta, this is probably where you should stop. The next few pictures will be actual placenta, though they aren't really gory, but better safe than sorry.

*

*

*

*

The placenta not only feeds your baby for duration of your pregnancy past the first trimester, it regulates all the hormones you have in your body. The ovaries are the first to maintain your hormones, but once your placenta is ready to go, it takes over the production and maintenance of all the hormones needed for pregnancy. Which is quite a bit deal.

The placenta has two sides, the side that faces the baby which the cord comes out of, and the maternal side, which to me looks like ground beef, but in bigger chunks. The fetal side is very smooth, very shiny, and the maternal side is the exact opposite. In the middle of the placenta is where the blood flow switches between the vessels from the mother to baby, without the blood ever actually mixing. It is such an amazing process, and the placenta does this for 7+ months! How is this not the coolest organ in our bodies?!

Plus, after birth, your body automatically expels it the same way it does the baby, without any outside help. It clamps the blood flow on its own after the placenta is detached, and shrinks back to normal size. Seriously, coolest thing ever.

My first placenta, very round, though I hadn't cleaned it off yet, and the cord attached was very short.

My second placenta. Oval shaped, the cord wasn't in the center, but what was still attached was really long. It was fun to be able to check it out in its entirety instead of just a stub.

Throughout the process of encapsulating (you can see the pictures of the process with the first placenta on my blog) I cut the sacs off, cut the cord off, cleaned the blood out, cut it into pieces, slow cooked it, ground it, and then put it into pills. My first placenta made 147 placenta pills, my second one made 216, which just shows the difference between a whole placenta and one that is ripped out and in pieces.

Now, there isn't really any research on how many pills a woman should take a day, but I tell the ones I do that it is anywhere from 2-4 a day, though it is up to you since you are just putting your placenta back in your body. Some women pop one whenever they start to feel run down or sad or just need an extra boost. It truly all depends on what you are comfortable doing.

The placenta is absolutely fascinating. It is treated as waste and a biohazard when in truth it is one of the greatest organs we have that we expel after birth and throw away. It does so much for the body and the baby, and even in birth videos, they never show the birth of the placenta, which is always something I love to watch almost as much as the birth of the baby. It is such an integral part of the birth process, and in most countries and cultures, the placenta is put into rituals, eaten, buried, and sometimes not even cut from the baby until it falls off on its own.

There are so many things that we don't understand about how the birth process works, and maybe we will be able to have more than a handful of people in the next few years wanting their placentas so they can start a ritual with their family, whether they just want to bury it under a bush, or if they will ingest it.

The placenta is remarkable, I wish every woman knew if its incredible power.