Has Anyone Delivered in Hosp. & Kept the Placenta?

[2sweetboysmom]

Lotus birth or just keeping all or part of the placenta. If so how hard did you have to fight for it? (After all the dear doctor just rescued you from it... right?)
I have had 2 hosp births and will most likely have one more. Only since discovering MDC have I been enlightened as to the benefits of the placenta. I am wondering if it is even remotely possible that I can keep all or part of my placenta.
TIA

[maxmama]

Depends on the hospital. I kept both ours and always offer the option of taking the placenta home to families after their birth. One of ours is still in the freezer, so I tell my friends not to look for ice cubes in my house (the red biohazard bag is a bit off-putting).

[heathenmom]

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[Full Heart]

I did. Dh actually forgot it when we left and I made him go back and get it . He said they looked at him a little wierd but handed it over. I can only imagine what they thought I was gonna do with it!

[lolar2]

If you go to a medical supply store, it's possible you might be able to buy a biological waste container ahead of time. That probably would make things easier.

[Samjm]

We had no problem getting the placenta at the hospital with DD's birth. We just told them we wanted it. They even have containers they keep on hand in the L&D area that are the perfect size, sealable etc. It is not an uncommon request at all from what I heard from the nurses.

[zinemama]

They were perfectly willing to give it to us at our hospital. Only problem is that we completely forgot about it, what with everything else, and by the time we called a week later, it had been incinerated. Oh, well.

[Jude Rose]

My doc wasn't phased at all. He says there were a lot of placenta requests. But I'm not telling 'em what I'm doing with it!

[nonconformnmom]

We kept ours. They assumed we wanted to bury it in the backyard(?), but my husband is a researcher and he wanted it for science. lol. (He needed some human tissue to run tests on.)

[MidwifeErika]

we tried, but they sent our placenta to pathology and preserved it with all sorts of nasty and dangerous chemicals we had even requested it and they said no problem.

[wombatclay]

Our hospital let's you do anything you want with the placenta in a normal delivery. In a c/s though they wont let you have it (since it's a surgical byproduct or something like that....it didn't have anything to do with it being the placenta...they just don't allow ANYONE to take ANYTHING that is considered a surgical byproduct. For example, a friend who had her wisdom teeth removed there wasn't allowed to keep the teeth.).

[JanetF]

It is *your* placenta so up to you, I hope! I had a c-sec with my first baby and still have his placenta

[KiwiZ]

I would ask ahead of time cuz I had 2 hospital births (diff hospitals) and they never even asked me and I never thought of it til afterwards. So if thats typical, make sure they know your desire ahead of time (cuz you also might forget in the joy of the moment)

[2sweetboysmom]

Thanks all!

[runes]

it was no problem for us, they put it in an extra large lidded cup (think smoothie cup) and then we just kept it in our cooler with lots of ice until we got home.

[amitymama]

I'm pretty clueless about placentas -- can someone fill me in on what the benefits of keeping it are? What are its uses?

[Momalea]

My dd was born at the hospital and they asked if we wanted to bring the placenta home. They put it in a thick plastic bag. 6 years later it's still in our freezer. In fact, there are now two placentas in our freezer. Every year we intend to take them up to my mother's property and plant them with a treee and every year we forget. Maybe this year!

amitymama-I know some people eat or do more ritualistic things with their placentas, but for me it just seemed like it was a part of my body and I wanted to do something with it more honoring than having it incinerated by someone who didn't care about it. However, I don't know if keeping them endlessly in my freezer is particularly honoring. I guess one advantage to keeping them so long is that my oldest likes to look at it once in a while and contemplate that she used to live inside of it. How many people can say they've seen the placenta that once nourished them?!?

[Novella]

Yes, Hopsital would have allowed us to keep the placenta

I delivered in a community hospital, enroute to the city hospital we had planned to deliver our twins at. We could have taken the placenta home.

I had been working/arguing over a mile-long birth plan with my city doctor for some time, so they knew that I might want to take the placenta home. My city doctor faxed my birth plan to the community hospital when it was suspected we would be unable to make the whole drive, but the attending doctor had not had time to properly review it prior to the delivery.

After the delivery, she further read our birth plan, and came to me to clarify "I may want to take my placenta home". (I had never firmly decided, but also thought that this inclusion might discourage them from early cord clamping - which we prohibited, but was done anyway - if the hospital routinely collected cord blood).

I decided not to bother taking the placenta home. I had wanted to perhaps make some prints with it. But buying several sheets of large, art-quality paper was one of those little things that just didn't get done prior to the birth. I wasn't interested in freezing it until spring so that I could bury it. So I said they could just get rid of it.

Now I'm really sorry that I did that. We did look at the placenta after the twins were born. But I miss not having an opportunity to really scrutinize it after some rest. And I'm sorry I didn't figure out the complicated logistics of quickly getting some art paper from the city after the birth and making those prints.

I would imagine that this is one non-mainstream request that is pretty easy to accomplish with most hospitals. I doubt anyone at the community hospital we birthed in had EVER asked to do this, but they treated it very normally. (On the other hand, they might have been so astonished by the litany of "crazy" ideas in my birth plan that this seemed pretty innocuous! As far as that goes, "crazy" was basically "let it all go naturally even though it's twins and Twin B is breech")