Placenta Returned to Mother on Judge's orders....

[bliss_eternal]

Placenta returned to mother on judge’s orders
New mom had plans to ingest the uterine lining, but then decided to bury it


Updated: 4:58 p.m. PT July 19, 2007
LAS VEGAS - A woman has won a court fight to keep the placenta after her daughter’s birth. She had planned to grind it up and ingest it as a way to fight postpartum depression, but now plans to bury it.

Clark County District Court Judge Susan Johnson granted a preliminary injunction Tuesday, ordering Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center in southern Nevada to return the placenta to Anne Swanson.

Hospital officials said they will comply

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taken from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19859122/wid/11915773?gt1=10212

So apparently we also have to fight for what comes AFTER a birth, too? :shrug:

[supernova]

1. Why on earth did this wind up in court?

If she requested that it be returned to her, then that should have happened. (Personally, the whole I idea gives me the willies, but she had the right.)

edit: Sometimes people get their gallstones and other surgical detritus afterwards, so I don't see what was so unusual about this.

[bliss_eternal]

2. I wondered the same thing...

...it wasn't clear from the article why this was an issue. It did state that usually it's considered biohazard and they get rid of it (in that hospital/area), but I still wasn't clear on how it ended in court. :shrug:

I thought I'd heard that too--that patients sometimes keep remnants from surgical procedures. Wondering how much of this has to do with the fact we are talking about a woman and birth. :eyes:

[ismnotwasm]

3. Whoa

There is no reason a women can't keep her own placenta. Not to my taste certainly (pun intended). I do think proper care and containment should be taken to prevent bacteria and other things growing, as well as ensuring HIV and other infections are not present, but so presumably does the women in question. Geez.

What's next, confiscating used menstrual products? (I can see it now, the menstrual product police, full bio gear-- HEY Dumb women, that's BIO HAZARD stuff!)

[noamnety]

4. That was my thought as well.

How in the hell did we get to this point, where women's bodies are biohazards, but genetically modified food isn't?

[iverglas]

5. it really is a biohazard

People may get teeth and gallstones returned to them -- but those are not tissue. You don't get your leg returned to you when it's amputated.

I horked up a really enormous blood clot when I haemorrhaged a week after my tonsillectomy. (Tonsillectomy in an adult is way more life-threatening than a first-trimester abortion, btw.) There is no way I would, or should, have been allowed to take it home. Or the tonsils themselves.

There's nothing mystical about a placenta, for pity's sake. It's a hunk of human tissue. I don't see any particular reason why anyone should be permitted to wander off with it.

Now there was a situation in Australia (could have been New Zealand) a few years ago when an Aboriginal woman requested her placenta, to be dealt with according to customary/religious belief. It's reasonable to make exceptions in such cases. In Canada, Sikh members of the RCMP are permitted to wear turbans instead of Stetsons, for example, but RCMP members whose religions do not involve wearing particular garb would not be permitted to use their headgear to make a fashion statement.

It's a difficult line -- why should an Aboriginal woman be permitted to deal with her placenta according to religious/customary belief, but not some white anglo-saxon woman whose crystal or spirit guide was telling her she needed to make soup out of it and feed it to the wolves?

Well, because in the first instance the right in issue is collective, not individual. The people have a collective right to their existence and their autonomy, and their culture is the expression of that right. The individual's actions in that case are the exercise of a collective right to exist, not of an individual right to dispose of one's body bits as one chooses.