when I was little, 5 or 6 maybe, I was watching tv in my room.. I turned to one of the PBS (educational) channels and they were showing a woman giving birth...

a) they come outta there?!?

b) why is she screaming so much????

they come outta there....

I do want to have children -- at least one (and preferably a girl, lol) -- but.. I dunno.. I keep remembering being scared by what I saw (if I do have one, I'm getting a C-section!!)...

~ mind you, I watched Dracula, Frankenstein and Wolfman movies with my dad at the same age and never flinched

I'm gonna brave it tonight though and catch this new show (well, new in America; yet again we're copying a British import): "One Born Every Minute"

http://www.mylifetime.com...ery-minute

The Real Miracle Is Surviving Each Other
“One Born Every Minute” takes an in-depth look at life inside the maternity ward at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, as expectant mothers enter their final stage of pregnancy. From the delivery room, to the operating room, to the front desk, to the nurses’ station, 40 cameras roll 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to capture the high drama, humor and overwhelming emotion of childbirth as new lives begin and others change forever.

In eight hour-long episodes, the hospital docu-series “One Born Every Minute” takes an in-depth look at life inside the maternity ward at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, as expectant mothers enter their final stage of pregnancy. From the delivery room, to the operating room, to the front desk, to the nurses’ station, 40 cameras roll 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to capture the high drama, humor and overwhelming emotion of childbirth as new lives begin and others change forever.

Based on the popular U.K. format, “One Born Every Minute” is produced by Reveille Independent, with Elisabeth Murdoch (“MasterChef”), Howard T. Owens (“MasterChef”), Daniel Soiseth (“America’s Next Top Model”), Robin Ashbrook (“Live to Dance”), Shelley Schulze (“Trauma: Life in the ER”), Sanjay Singhal (“The Event: How Racist Are You?”), and JoAnn Alfano, Gena McCarthy and Sandy Varo Jarrell of Lifetime Television executive-producing.

For more information on Riverside Methodist Hospital, visit www.birthofamom.com.

Anybody else catching this tonight? Any Brits who enjoyed the original series?

[Edited 2/1/11 13:03pm]

I always wondered if they paid these people. Do they? Even with the other Baby reality shows...

We've had this for a while now in the UK. I love it. Nothing like watching people give birth!

Evvy said:

I always wondered if they paid these people. Do they? Even with the other Baby reality shows...

for this, I hope they at least pay the medical bills..

I have to admit, I haven't really watched other baby shows --- like that "I didn't know I was pregnant" one...

unless you're, like, grossly obese, how can you not know for 40 weeks (10 months) -- they move about.. i n s i d e you!!

Lisa10 said:

We've had this for a while now in the UK. I love it. Nothing like watching people give birth!

It's amazing how big the vag gets during childbirth. All that fluid. All that stuff covering the baby. The slimy umbilical cord. It's all so gross yet utterly amazing. It's also amazing how they can mold that cone head back into a nice round shape.

LOL.. my cousin had a cone for a while....

maybe that's why he's so.. bizarre..

Why are women not allowed to keep their placenta? The cosmetic companies buy this stuff up and put it in creams/lotions/hair products and all these women enduring long and painful hours of labor get bupkus! No compensation for their own bodily product.

HotGritz said:

Why are women not allowed to keep their placenta? The cosmetic companies buy this stuff up and put it in creams/lotions/hair products and all these women enduring long and painful hours of labor get bupkus! No compensation for their own bodily product.

I thought you could keep your stuff - like cord blood...

When my friend had her last baby the doctor wouldn't let her keep anything. They discarded all of it as waste. Waste my ass....they're selling the stuff. She also had a fibroid that they were able to remove after the baby and they wouldn't even let her look at it. I would think we all have a right to see what comes out of us and to know what is being done with the material or even keep it if we want. It's ours; we made it!

depends on where you are, I guess..

http://www.salon.com/life...for_dinner

Wednesday, Jun 23, 2010 21:24 ET

On tonight's menu: Placenta

Most women's afterbirth winds up in the trash. I fried mine with a little soy, garlic and ginger

By Holly Kretschmar

Before getting pregnant, the idea of eating my placenta had never occurred to me. My hippie aunt had buried hers under a tree. That sounded nice. But a month before my son was born, my doula (a birth assistant I hired to coach me during labor) asked, "Do you know what you want to do with your placenta? I have a great recipe."

My husband, who had been hesitant to hire what sounded like a New Age-y junior doctor, shot me a skeptical look across our kitchen table. I knew he was thinking, "Of course the doula has a great placenta recipe." But after a year's immersion in the halls of modern medicine, I was ready to absorb all the earthy wisdom I could. The world of science no longer held the answers it had promised, so I was open to a new perspective. Trying to conceive had been an anxiously deliberate process, involving ovulation thermometers, injections, surgery and a scheduled date with a test tube; in vitro fertilization loomed on the horizon. Our doctor told us we had a .0001 percent chance of getting pregnant on our own, so we had almost -- almost -- given up trying.

When two blue bars dawned across the pregnancy test stick, I burst into tears, a mixture of sweet relief and anguish that it could be a false positive. Six sticks later, I had enough proof to convince me I was actually, naturally pregnant, and we could cancel my rendezvous with the test tube.

"I really can't explain this," our fertility doctor told us when she saw my blood test. For weeks, I was flooded with humble awe. We had worked hard (overplanned, overanxious sex really does feel like work) and wished harder, but I knew there was more to be grateful for than our own perseverance. We're not religious people, but we felt as if we had slipped through some kind of cosmic loophole and couldn't take full credit for the mystery unfolding in my womb. The placenta was ground zero, and I wanted to get to know it better.

As my body calmly and quietly created a new human, I felt as if I were in the back seat while a mysterious driver piloted my organs. I was possessed by new appetites, pumped up with new fluids, and with no conscious instruction, my body had spun a miraculous pod for my baby, providing nourishment, shielding him from toxins, ferrying his waste and cushioning his body for the nine months that he lived inside me.

In the West, the majority of placentas are dumped in the trash. But the placenta is considered sacred by some cultures. And virtually all mammals, including herbivorous ones, eat their afterbirth. Placentophagy, as it's called, may be inspired by a new mother's need for extra nutrients or her desire to erase the trace of her birth in order to throw off predators; there is also a theory that the placenta contains a pain-deadening molecule. Most people are repulsed by the idea of eating their own flesh, particularly an excretion from the vagina. But one person's gross is another person's delicious, as we know from the fact that fresh monkey brains, fried roaches and dog scrotum are delicacies in various parts of the world. As anthropologists know, "yuck" is culturally constructed.

Esther, our doula, told me about the energy-restoring properties of the placenta, and how consuming it is an ancient practice, especially beneficial for warding off postpartum depression. She mentioned the growing movement in the natural birth community to encapsulate dehydrated placentas into pills, reputed to bestow mental and physical benefits to the mother over time. "But eating it is more fun," she said with a wink. Esther knew that I was vegetarian and hadn't sampled more than a tentative bite of flesh in 20 years. This was a rare chance to enjoy meat. Not just any meat: my meat.

I cringed to think what my mother and sister, both doctors, would think if they knew we were considering eating so-called medical waste. Intuitively, the idea of dumping my placenta in the trash was an unceremonious fate for the sophisticated nest that had protected my baby before I knew how. The word "placenta" comes from the Latin word for "cake" -- in German, the word is Mutterkuchen, meaning "mother cake" -- and I started to realize that consuming this architectural feat could be a symbolic tribute. I had spent nine months feeding the baby through this extraordinary two-way filter, and now it would feed me, completing a kind of nourishing cycle.

A week after my son's birth, Esther visited our house. I held our baby while she pulled a Pyrex dish from our fridge and tipped it onto a cutting board. The crimson mass flopped out like a fish. "This was the side that faced you," she said, gently lifting the meat to show me a honeycomb of thin white branches. "And this side faced the baby," as she lifted a thin membrane and turned the sac inside out. The slab was thick and juicy looking, about the size of a dinner plate. Esther used a paring knife to separate the fibrous, outer membranes from the dense interior. It was surprisingly porous, like a sea sponge squeezed tightly, crowded with passages. As I looked at the tiny channels, I thought about my pregnancy cravings for black beans and salsa, grapefruit and chocolate, and pictured little nutrient nuggets careening down the branches into my baby, wondering whether he had taken particular pleasure from the chocolate morsels, or begrudged the grapefruit. It seemed amazing that my body could produce meat -- and was meat -- even when it had been sustained on vegetables, grains and legumes, amazing in the same way that an infant can be sustained on breast milk alone, or a 1,000-pound horse on grass.

Esther marinated the placenta in a soy, sesame, garlic and ginger sauce. Then, she left us to do the rest. Following her recipe, we fried the steaks with mushrooms for five minutes on each side, turning when the flesh had browned. My kitchen filled with the heavy, primal scent of organ meat, a first in the five years we had lived there. We debated over the appropriate beverage. (Breast milk?) We finally chose a shiraz, following a lyrical logic that only a full-bodied wine could match the fruits of my full body's harvest. Finally, we plated the steaks with wild rice and vegetables and dug in. My husband and I traded our single steak knife back and forth. The meat was both porous and dense, with a texture like spongy volcanic rock, a compact network of cells permeated by thousands of tiny holes. "It's a lot like liver," my husband observed. He is an enthusiastic meat eater, but I noticed he was proceeding with caution. Apparently, I'm an acquired taste.

The meat felt heavy and chewy in my mouth, part sponge, part brick. I ate slowly and deliberately, taking deep breaths between bites.

"This is, um, challenging," I said, gulping my wine.

"You taste gooood, darling," my husband said, picking up speed.

"I do?" I tried to find a me-ness in the flavor, the way I look for myself in my son's face. Did I taste different from a carnivore? Did I need to eat animals' meat in order to enjoy my own meat? Would my future placentas taste different than this one? Was there a hint of chocolate?

I cut a large bite so that I'd finish sooner.

"Three bites down! Six more to go!" I celebrated, willing myself onward.

"Just leave it -- I'll finish it!" my husband volunteered, devouring his portion. But I was committed, eating it to love it. As a vegetarian, this was the closest I would get to carnivore-ism, let alone cannibalism. Perhaps the fact that my mother cake was an acquired taste proved that my body had better things to do -- growing a life -- than delighting my taste buds. It was a multifunctional organ; too smart to taste like pastry, too mysterious to taste like fruit.

I stacked an onion and a pepper on my fork, sandwiching the chunk of meat. "It's largely organic and free range," my husband said, all mock salesman. It occurred to me that this meat of mine was truly sustainable, a renewable resource created without killing. In a way, our culinary experiment was the ultimate act of consumption: eating life without taking life.

"Would you eat another woman's mother cake?" I asked my husband.

He paused and raised his fork. "Depends."

"Depends on what?"

"On how attractive she is."

I took that as a compliment.

Holly Kretschmar is a writer, mother and innovation consultant based in Los Angeles. She is birthing a second placenta (and a child) in September.

@ part sponge, part brick.

hmm. I don't know that I would eat it but I'm not opposed to making my own batch of beauty products from it.

HotGritz said:

When my friend had her last baby the doctor wouldn't let her keep anything. They discarded all of it as waste. Waste my ass....they're selling the stuff. She also had a fibroid that they were able to remove after the baby and they wouldn't even let her look at it. I would think we all have a right to see what comes out of us and to know what is being done with the material or even keep it if we want. It's ours; we made it!

ditto!

I know this is bizarre, kinda, but when my mom had her hysterectomy, I asked the surgeon where her uterus was.. My mom was still out of it, but the doc (a woman) and my aunt looked at me like I was nuts..

I hadn't seen it in like 28 yrs... I just wanted to see what it looked like..

^ yeah, why not be able to at least look at it?

My mom had uterine tumors the size of baseballs and I would have loved to see them up close if for no other reason than a learning experience.

The infamous "they" sure want Americans to have babies on the mind. How many look at my baby, or see how many babies I've had shows do we need?

And you two are sick, talking eating placenta or smearing it on your face, sick, I tell ya.

i think i'll bake some placenta cookies for my co-workers

It's good for the hair and skin. It has protein in it.

Considering the fact that I've eaten mystery meat laden tacos from Taco Bell....I might actually eat some placenta.

Anybody got a good pasta and placenta recipe? Damn now I gotta raid the surgery rooms for a pregnant lady ready to pop!

crazee org people

morningsong said:

crazee org people

have a placenta popsicle

http://www.beautyorigins....tioner.htm

I don't think they make this one anymore though...

http://www.queenhelene.co...ehome2.php

http://www.walgreens.com/...d=prod8970

Is very nice!! -- and there are no placenta bits in it

[Edited 2/1/11 18:41pm]

morningsong said:

The infamous "they" sure want Americans to have babies on the mind. How many look at my baby, or see how many babies I've had shows do we need?

And you two are sick, talking eating placenta or smearing it on your face, sick, I tell ya.

I am not the author of the ate-my-own-placenta article

and I only use it in my hair (deep conditioner)

HotGritz said:

Why are women not allowed to keep their placenta? The cosmetic companies buy this stuff up and put it in creams/lotions/hair products and all these women enduring long and painful hours of labor get bupkus! No compensation for their own bodily product.

I have both of mine from both children ~ here if you ask, you can keep it

Lisa10 said:

We've had this for a while now in the UK. I love it. Nothing like watching people give birth!

I can't watch, I cry just from the ads!

I'm not watching a vagina parade unless they're taking big dicks in and out of them.

johnart said:

I'm not watching a vagina parade unless they're taking big dicks in and out of them.

next time I come, we're watching it.

and I mean the show on Lifetime; not a coitus parade..

[Edited 2/1/11 19:02pm]

ZombieKitten said:

Lisa10 said:

We've had this for a while now in the UK. I love it. Nothing like watching people give birth!

I can't watch, I cry just from the ads!

Really? Aww, bless ya!

Childbirth doesn't make me cry, or actually feel overly emotional at all. Even when I had my own two I asked the midwife if it was weird that I wasn't crying or emotional about my newborn child. It all kicked in when my milk came in.

it was cool.. I liked it

-- and they blurred out the vaginas..

PositivityNYC said:

morningsong said:

The infamous "they" sure want Americans to have babies on the mind. How many look at my baby, or see how many babies I've had shows do we need?

And you two are sick, talking eating placenta or smearing it on your face, sick, I tell ya.

I am not the author of the ate-my-own-placenta article

and I only use it in my hair (deep conditioner)

I guess it’s obvious I’m not the earth mother type. I long for the days when you checked in, they knocked you out, and when you awoke you had the precious pristine little bundle all swaddled, gently placed in your arms. All sterile and perfect, aww.

Ok, I kid.

Though I have to admit, for me, consuming or wearing what my body brings forth is beyond my city-fied mentality, the whole symbolism of bringing the placenta home to plant beneath a sapling or something like that is appealing to me. I’ve heard a lot of people do that.

morningsong said:

PositivityNYC said:

I am not the author of the ate-my-own-placenta article

and I only use it in my hair (deep conditioner)

I guess it’s obvious I’m not the earth mother type. I long for the days when you checked in, they knocked you out, and when you awoke you had the precious pristine little bundle all swaddled, gently placed in your arms. All sterile and perfect, aww.

Ok, I kid.

Though I have to admit, for me, consuming or wearing what my body brings forth is beyond my city-fied mentality, the whole symbolism of bringing the placenta home to plant beneath a sapling or something like that is appealing to me. I’ve heard a lot of people do that.

I never understood that --- the unconscious thing; labor seems to take sooo long in some women.. one of my aunts was in labor for like 36 hours with her 2nd baby..