Placenta Quotes

I’ve even delivered a few of their babies. (Wulf) Really? (Cassandra) Oh, yeah. You have to love the days before modern roads, and hospitals when I was up to my elbows in placenta. (Wulf)

Everyone who’s born has come from the sea. Your mother’s womb is just a sea in small. And birds come of seas on eggs. Horses lie in the sea before they’re born. The placenta is the sea. Your blood is the sea continued in your veins. We are the ocean — walking on the land.

You may never have experienced, or you will have forgotten, a good burgundy (her favourite) or a good Sancerre (also her favourite) decanted through a healthy placenta.

Suzanne had totally forgotten about their court date since she'd been a little busy having tons of condom-free sex with Ryder, planning Nikki's wedding, and forming a placenta.

Who's that you can see in his suit of magenta? It's me - I've been soaked head to toe in placenta.

Now we must feast!’ Dorothy declared as they headed indoors. Not on the baby, but on its placenta, fried by Jeanette with onions and parsley. Viola declined her portion – it seemed like cannibalism, not to mention utterly disgusting.

The human placenta is filled with nutritious benefits, one of which is creating a fertile environment. At my age, I'm going to need all the help I can to have a baby, and if having a placenta smoothie or two helps - I won't count it out." "That's like some pretty satanic shit." Ethan is quick to observe. "Like voodoo or something.

Putting my hands on. What April couldn't fix Wasn't worth the time: Egg shell & dried placenta Light as memory. Patches of fur, feathers, & bits of skin. A nest Of small deaths among anemone. A canopy edged over, shadowplaying The struggle underneath As if it never happened

...the putrid carnal waste dump my skin and hair had become. An irate woman beating me with her placenta would have been more welcome than the copious amount of...snot gluing my fingers together.

It's with such profound happiness. Such a hallelujah. Hallelujah, I shout, hallelujah merging with the darkest human howl of the pain of separation but a shout of diabolic joy. Because no one can hold me back now. I can still reason - I studied mathematics, which is the madness of reason - but now I want the plasma - I want to eat straight from the placenta. I am a little scared: scared of surrendering completely because the next instant is unknown. The next instant, do I make it? or does it make itself? We make it together with our breath. And with the flair of the bullfighter in the ring.

I may be a monster, but I’m a sensitive monster… I went to church, I have a sister, I’m Italian, and I’ve probably seen the sun set and rise as many times as anyone. I liked cutting the umbilical cord at my son Taj’s birth. I liked smelling the placenta. I like the act of making love rather than saying, “I fucked you!” If anybody wants to see the spiritual side of Steven Tyler, well, it’s fucking there!

Be curious, relentlessly curious. “I have no special talents,” Einstein once wrote to a friend. “I am just passionately curious.”4 Leonardo actually did have special talents, as did Einstein, but his distinguishing and most inspiring trait was his intense curiosity. He wanted to know what causes people to yawn, how they walk on ice in Flanders, methods for squaring a circle, what makes the aortic valve close, how light is processed in the eye and what that means for the perspective in a painting. He instructed himself to learn about the placenta of a calf, the jaw of a crocodile, the tongue of a woodpecker, the muscles of a face, the light of the moon, and the edges of shadows. Being relentlessly and randomly curious about everything around us is something that each of us can push ourselves to do, every waking hour, just as he did.

This reminds me: Are you going to eat the placenta?” Renée asked Harper. “I understand that’s a thing now. We stocked a pregnancy guide at the bookstore with a whole chapter of placenta recipes in the back. Omelets and pasta sauces and so on.” “No, I don’t think so,” Harper said. “Dining on the placenta smacks of cannibalism, and I was hoping for a more dignified apocalypse.” “Rabbit mothers eat their own babies,” the Mazz said. “I found that out reading Watership Down. Apparently the mamas chow on their newborns all the time. Pop them down just like little meat Skittles.

Los pájaros se entierran en pleno cielo. Incluso la más elegante de las nubes está repleta de sus cuerpecitos yertos. Se dice que de cada 10.189 gotas de lluvia, 1 sería la lágrima de un pájaro y que de cada 16.474 copos de nieve, 1 el fantasma de un pájaro descolgado de la placenta celeste.

¿Alguna vez has intentado hacer realidad una fantasía sexual? No tiene gracia. Es desagradable e incómodo, o afectado. Cuando vas a hacerla realidad, no te excita. La fantasía funciona mejor mientras sigue siendo una fantasía. La dejas salir al mundo y termina pareciendo una placenta deforme y toda ensangrentada.

It was almost as if Aurelia absorbed her daughter’s misery through some sort of invisible placenta. Surely

In this way, the placenta is a kind of language – perhaps our first one, our true mother tongue.

I became a vegan the day I watched a video of a calf being born on a factory farm. The baby was dragged away from his mother before he hit the ground. The helpless calf strained its head backwards to find his mother. The mother bolted after her son and exploded into a rage when the rancher slammed the gate on her. She wailed the saddest noise I’d ever heard an animal make, and then thrashed and dug into the ground, burying her face in the muddy placenta. I had no idea what was happening respecting brain chemistry, animal instinct, or whatever. I just knew that this was deeply wrong. I just knew that such suffering could never be worth the taste of milk and veal. I empathized with the cow and the calf and, in so doing, my life changed.

The weight of the average placenta is roughly one and a half pounds. A disposable organ where nutrients, hormones, and waste are passed between mother and fetus. In this way, the placenta is a kind of language—perhaps our first one, our true mother tongue. At four or five months, my brother’s placenta was already fully developed. You two were speaking—in blood utterances.

All of that caretaking,” I say. I lean back so I can look at her. I’m crying too. Crying and talking. “All of it’s in his bones. It’s the actual stuff of his body and brain. The placenta you made from scratch. Your milk from nursing him. All those pancakes and school-lunch sandwiches, all of that food and care.” She’s looking into my face, nodding, even though I am fully winging it now, panicking, words pouring out like I’m a hose on the weepy consolation setting. “Everything you’ve ever fed him,” I say. “His whole self is made completely out of your love.

This reminds me: Are you going to eat the placenta?” Renée asked Harper. “I understand that’s a thing now. We stocked a pregnancy guide at the bookstore with a whole chapter of placenta recipes in the back. Omelets and pasta sauces and so on.” “No, I don’t think so,” Harper said. “Dining on the placenta smacks of cannibalism, and I was hoping for a more dignified apocalypse.” “Rabbit

The Virtual Birth Center tells us how to prepare Placenta Cocktail (8 oz. V-8, 2 ice cubes, ½ cup carrot, and ¼ cup raw placenta, puréed in a blender for 10 seconds), Placenta Lasagna, and Placenta Pizza.

Like I could take a nap at 4:15 p.m. and then I'll wake up twenty minutes later and have absolutely no clue where I am. I'm like, "What era is this? Is it the 1920s? Am I a flapper? Should I go and put on a flapper costume and go flap at a party?" Then I'm like, "Is that what flappers even do? Flap? Is flapping a verb?" I'm that out of it. And I'm also drenched in sweat. Like some little Dutch boy in knickers ran over to me while I was sleeping and poured a bucket of water on me. Or like I have malaria and it's 1932 and I'm surrounded by mosquito netting. I'm drenched. I'm covered in goo. I'm like a baby deer covered in placenta hobbling around trying to learn how to walk, thinking that it's the 1920s and I'm a flapper and there's a little Dutch boy running around with a bucket of water. That's what naps are like for me.

If there’s anything left in the uterus after delivery - placenta, amniotic membranes, a Lego Darth Vader - the uterus can’t contract back down properly, and this causes bleeding until the offending item is removed. 

The weight of the average placenta is roughly one and a half pounds. A disposable organ where nutrients, hormones, and waste are passed between mother and fetus. In this way, the placenta is a kind of language—perhaps our first one, our true mother tongue.

Partir est mourir un peu. I was very young when I first heard this sentence quoted and it expressed a truth I already knew. I remember it now because the experience of living in you as if you were a country, the only country in the world where I can never conceivably meet you face to face, this is a little like the experience of living with the memory of the dead. What I did not know when I was very young was that nothing can take the past away: the past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

A despeito dos buracos negros e da temperatura baixa do ambiente - nossas pernocas frias, os pelinhos eriçados dos braços -, havia uma ligação forte que nos unia, um sentimento bruto de família, uma cumplicidade gelatinosa que nos protegia como uma placenta. Estávamos juntos. Éramos juntos.

So what does any of this have to do with maternal stress during pregnancy? It turns out that high doses of many of the major stress hormones, including cortisol and adrenaline, interfere with testosterone production. Men, for instance, show a decreased level of circulating testosterone when they are significantly stressed. Because maternal stress hormones can cross the placenta, it has been proposed that pregnant females who are highly stressed may release sufficient quantities of adrenal hormones to interfere with the usual testosterone surge in male fetuses, thereby nudging their brains toward more feminine behavior, including a propensity for homosexuality.

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

The weight of the average placenta is roughly one and a half pounds. A disposable organ where nutrients, hormones, and waste are passed between mother and fetus. In this way, the placenta is a kind of language--perhaps our first one, our true mother tongue. At four or five months, my brother's placenta was already fully developed. You two were speaking--in blood utterances.

She knows he is there now, hedgehogged in terror. Like someone whose arm has been amputated, so, since they cut the umbilical cord, she keeps feeling him swimming and kicking in the placenta of the world, which as always is filled with gold fish and singing dolphins but also alligators and leeches and all sorts of mollusks. And people who in the blink of an eye turn into telescreens.

Psychodynamic theorists and psychologists of various traditions theorise that the sense of having fallen originates in our experience of birth. We are created in the body of woman and grow in the womb where all our needs are automatically met. Then we fall, in birth, into the human world, separated from our maternal Eden, but always remembering a heavenly place where all our needs were met. It should not be a surprise, but we now know that the baby in the womb can see and hear and remember. Any parent who has seen a placenta will know that it is made in the image of a tree, a wondrous tree of life that fed us until we were ready for birth. Is it any surprise that in so many traditions the symbolism of trees is so important? The tree of life is the first thing we see in the womb, we never forget this and psychodynamic theorists argue we yearn for this, all our lives, hoping to escape life’s frustrations by returning to a blissful womb like state. If this is true, is it any wonder that legends of fallen angels so fascinate and entice us? In these legends perhaps we see echoes of our own fall. Psychologically we identify with those with whom we share similar experiences; and the fallen angels can easily become mirrors in which to see ourselves.

She realized he wasn’t listening to music and gave him a curious look of amusement as she picked up the cover to an audio book. ‘What To Expect When You’re Expecting.’ God forgive me, I love this man. “Thought I should be informed, you know?” Alessandro explained sheepishly. Bree tried to tear her gaze away from his gleaming chest. “Plus all the lactating and dilating and placenta talk does wonders to crush any man’s libido.

Other examples of human-sourced pharmaceuticals surely causing more distress than they relieved include strips of cadaver skin tied around the calves to prevent cramping, “old liquified placenta” to “quieten a patient whose hair stands up without cause” (I’m quoting Li Shih-chen on this one and the next), “clear liquid feces” for worms (“the smell will induce insects to crawl out of any of the body orifices and relieve irritation”), fresh blood injected into the face for eczema

A horror story. Patient GL, whose genetic make-up appears to be 50 per cent goji berry recipes and 50 per cent Mumsnet posts, has announced she wants to eat her placenta. The midwife and I both pretend not to hear this – firstly because we don’t know what the hospital protocol is, and secondly because it’s completely revolting. GL calls it ‘placentophagia’ to make it sound more official, which doesn’t particularly wash; you can make anything sound official by translating it into the ancient Greek.*

Jamie came back to the apartment one night to find her spreading a viscous fluid onto a canvas. It was threaded wtih blood. "Good God," he said. "What the hell is that?" Pia didn't bother to look up but continued to knead the clear slime across the canvas. "It's my new piece." "But what is it?" He kept pointing. He'd never seen something so disgusting in his life. And her hands were completely in it. "It's Jodie's placenta. She gave it to me. I'm going to tack it up and let it dry on this canvas. Then I'm gonna glue-gun pictures of dead fetuses onto Lucite and make them the centerpeice." "Uh huh." She raised her sticky hands to him. "It's about women, you know? The way that the world opresses them, all right? And it's about babies, and . . . I don't know . . . I just got the placenta today." "Wow, that's wow . . . that's . . ." No words for this. He scratched his chin as she spread her hands in a concentric motion across the canvas. "So, do you really think anyone's gonna want to put that up on their wall when it's done?" he asked. She scowled, displeased.

The Dieter's Daughter Mom's got this taco guy's poem taped to the fridge, some ode to celery, which she is always eating. The celery, I mean, not the poem which talks about green angels and fragile corsets. I don't get it, but Mom says by the time she reads it she forgets she's hungry. One stalk for breakfast, along with half a grapefruit, or a glass of aloe vera juice, you know that stuff that comes from cactus, and one stalk for lunch with some protein drink that tastes like dried placenta, did you know that they put cow placenta in make-up, face cream, stuff like that? Yuck. Well, Mom says it's never too early to wish you looked different, which means I got to eat that crap too. Mom says: your body is a temple, not the place all good twinkies go to. Mom says: that boys remember girls that're slender. Mom says that underneath all this fat there's a whole new me, one I'd really like if only I gave myself the chance. Mom says: you are what you eat, which is why she eats celery, because she wants to be thin, not green or stringy, of course-- am I talking too fast?-- but thin as paper like the hearts we cut out and send to ourselves, don't tell anyone, like the hearts of gold melons we eat down to the bitter rind.

Cuento apenas con este yacimiento, la placenta aún tibia en la memoria de lo único reseñable en la vida de esa mujer, haber sido un eslabón en la cadena del mestizaje. Cuando se sabe tan poco es porque nunca se ha querido saber, porque se ha mirado a otro lado con incomodidad y no mirar es como borrar, invocar la tormenta de arena sobre la huaca sin ceremonia, una erosión progresiva. Hasta que el período de latencia termina. Y nos vemos dispuestas al hallazgo. Aprendemos que los huesos no se lavan con agua. Que hay que soplar dulcemente sobre las grietas y laberintos óseos. Contar los anillos de crecimiento de un árbol seccionado. Lamer la gota brillante de resina roja de todos los ojos cerrados y muertos. Verter algo radiactivo sobre la arcilla y ver aparecer en letras ardientes el Tiempo como un baile de máscaras.

Stillness pooled like blood and Devon sat, stunned and terrified to move in case her universe tilted again. The aunts were already cleaning up: wiping blood off her legs, changing the sheets around her as best they could. Someone carried the placenta away. “Your milk will be black, when it comes in,” Gailey said. “Don’t be alarmed by that. All perfectly normal.” Devon just nodded, too overwhelmed to speak. Perfectly normal? How could anything be normal ever again? Her life had been a series of twisted fairy tales in which she had imagined herself the princess, but this, here, living and breathing and snuffling in her arms, had more truth than all of her swallowed stories combined. She was her daughter’s whole world, a realization both humbling and empowering. Devon had never been anybody’s world before—had never been anything at all, in fact, except the sum of paper flesh she’d consumed without thought.

Sauté, stirring regularly, the butter, onions, garlic, baby leaves, thyme, a pinch of salt and few grinds of pepper, until the onions are translucent. Meanwhile, remove the cord, membranes, and any clots from the placenta. Rinse it under cold water. Quarter it, set three quarters aside for another use, and add the remaining quarter to the sauté. Remove placenta when it is cooked through. Slice thin and set aside. Continue cooking the onions, stirring regularly, until they become brown.Add wine and simmer until the liquid evaporates and the onions lose their form. Add flour. Mix well. With a low flame, cook, stirring regularly, for 5 minutes. Add water, beef, placenta or chicken stock, and sliced placenta. Simmer for 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. To serve: preheat broiler. In oven-friendly serving bowls or pot, cover the hot soup with cubed sourdough bread and the bread with grated cheese. Broil until the cheese melts

The conditions in the womb—in the intrauterine environment—influence the development of the fetus, so that subtly different conditions will lead, in effect, to the birth of newborns who respond differently to the environment they face outside the womb. In particular, the nutrients that the developing child receives in the womb—including the supply of glucose—pass across the placenta in proportion to the nutrient concentration in the mother’s circulation. The higher the mother’s blood sugar, the greater the supply of glucose to the fetus. The developing pancreas responds by overproducing insulin-secreting cells. “The baby is not diabetic,” says Boyd Metzger, who studies diabetes and pregnancy at Northwestern University, “but the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas are stimulated to function and grow in size and number by the environment they’re in. So they start overfunctioning. That in turn leads to a baby laying down more fat, which is why the baby of a diabetic mother is typified by being a fat baby.

That Sunday night of Elena's third birthday, I wept beside her in bed. For her, but more, I believe, for myself: for a resilience I never knew I had, and that I believe all mothers possess, however they choose to express it. We are not soft, docile icons, mute and passive virgins: we are fucking fierce. Motherhood requires a tremendous bravery that I never recognized or celebrated before I was forced to come into it, shaking and stunned. It leads women to march, to protest, to fight, to enact change, to persevere at great risk to themselves, to challenge the very foundation of society. After the placenta had been buried, we set the rock atop it, and we all walked back to the house. Elena jumped on a mini trampoline, my niece went to recover from all the overqrought midlife emotion on the couch, my parents made lunch. I washed the blood from my hands, thinking about the oak, the rock, the placenta. Buried there is the truth of what it feels like to be so susceptible and broken-open, and also to say: I can do this. I will do this. I contain this, thirty-two miles of capillaries, a new tree of life. Mutter, madre, mater, material, moeder, modder: the mud, the material, the making at the heart of everything.

The expression "fee thulumaatin thalaathin," translated into English as "a threefold darkness," indicates three dark regions involved during the development of the embryo. These are: a) The darkness of the abdomen b) The darkness of the womb c) The darkness of the placenta As we have seen, modern biology has revealed that the embryological development of the baby takes place in the manner revealed in the verse, in three dark regions. Moreover, advances in the science of embryology show that these regions consist of three layers each. The lateral abdominal wall comprises three layers: the external oblique, the internal oblique, and transverses abdominis muscles.91 Similarly, the wall of the womb also consists of three layers: the epimetrium, the myometrium and the endometrium.92 Similarly again, the placenta surrounding the embryo also consists of three layers: the amnion (the internal membrane around the foetus), the chorion (the middle amnion layer) and the decidua (outer amnion layer.)93 It is also pointed out in this verse that a human being is created in the mother's womb in three distinct stages. Indeed, modern biology has also revealed that the baby's embryological development takes place in three distinct regions in the mother's womb. Today, in all the embryology textbooks studied in departments of medicine, this subject is taken as an element of basic knowledge. For instance, in Basic Human Embryology, a fundamental reference text in the field of embryology, this fact is stated as follows: The life in the uterus has three stages: pre-embryonic; first two and a half weeks, embryonic; until the end of the eight week, and fetal; from the eight week to labor.

Harvard University biologist David Haig has spent the last few years systematically debunking the notion that the relationship between a mother and her unborn child is anything like the rose-tinted idyll that one usually finds on the glossy covers of maternity magazines. In fact, it is anything but. Pre-eclampsia, a condition of dangerously high blood pressure in pregnant women, is brutally kick-started by nothing short of a foetal coup d’état. It begins with the placenta invading the maternal bloodstream and initiating what, in anyone’s book, is a ruthless biological heist – an in utero sting operation to draw out vital nutrients. And I’m not just talking about baby Gordon Gekkos here – I’m talking about all of us. The curtain-raiser is well known to obstetricians. The foetus begins by injecting a crucial protein into the mother’s circulation which forces her to drive more blood, and therefore more nourishment, into the relatively low-pressure placenta. It’s a scam, pure and simple, which poses a significant and immediate risk to the mother’s life. ‘The bastard!’ says Andy. ‘Shall we get some olives?’ ‘And it’s by no means the only one,’ I continue. In another embryonic Ponzi scheme, foetal release of placental lactogen counteracts the effect of maternal insulin thereby increasing the mother’s blood sugar level and providing an excess for the foetus’s own benefit. ‘A bowl of the citrus and chilli and a bowl of the sweet pepper and basil,’ Andy says to the waiter. Then he peers at me over the menu. ‘So basically what you’re saying then is this: forget the Gaddafis and the Husseins. When it comes to chemical warfare it’s the unborn child that’s top dog!’ ‘Well they definitely nick stuff that isn’t theirs,’ I say. ‘And they don’t give a damn about the consequences.’ Andy smiles. ‘So in other words they’re psychopaths!’ he says. BABY

Gregori approached the tiny being cautiously. The extent of the trauma was enormous. The baby was fading as blood gushed from its mother’s body. He could feel its willingness to slide away from the pain and outrage of the assault. He could only hope Shea would stop the bleeding quickly, as he had to concentrate on the child. She was so tiny, almost nonexistent, yet he could feel her pain and her puzzlement. She knew fear before she was born, knew pain, and now held forever the knowledge that life was not safe, even here in her mother’s womb. Gregori murmured softly, reassuringly, to her. He had bathed her in his light once before, and she recognized him now, moved toward him, seeking comfort. Very carefully he attended to the wound in the artery that supplied her with nourishment. Very soon he would give her his own blood, sealing her fate, binding her ever closer to him. There were several tears in the placenta, which he meticulously sealed. She was afraid as his light floated closer, so he provided waves of reassurance and warmth. There was a laceration in her right thigh. It hurt, and blood was seeping into the fluid surrounding her. With the lightest of touches he closed the wound, his touch lingering to calm her. His chant, the low pitch of his voice, echoed in her heart, in her mind, invading her soul. Gregori talked to her as he worked, the purity of his tone beguiling her, soothing her, so that she stayed with Raven rather than simply letting go, fading away with the steady trickle of blood. Gregori could feel the strength in her, the determination. Without a doubt, she was Mikhail and Raven’s daughter. If she chose to go, she would do so, but if she chose to stay, she would fight with every breath left in her body. Gregori made certain she wanted to fight. He whispered to her in his most beguiling voice, promised a fascinating future, lured her with the secrets and beauty of the universe awaiting her. He promised her she would never be left alone; he would be there to guide her, to protect her, to see to her happiness.

I like planned parenthood. I support the woman's right to choose if she wants to murder her future baby. I do feel for the janitor though, this one time he was taking out the trash filled with all of the dead baby bodies... (I mean let's face it, that's where they put them. So let's be mature about this please. No laughter or funny comments. These are dead babies we’re talking about,) Anyways, the bag ripped, and squish! All the heads, torsos, everything oozed out of the bag. He was trying to mop up all the placenta juices and bodies when he slipped. It looked like a 3-Stooges bit. He had stepped on one skull for traction, and had another foot jammed so far up a stillborn's ribcage, it looked like he was wearing a shoe. He was mopping it up when someone's dog broke its leash and came running to slurp up the mess. Oh the horror! That dog must have ate at least 3 or 4 babies that day. Talk about a sticky situation! Rape is bad... But... Sometimes girls rape guys too. I'll give you an example. Anytime a guy wants to have sex, and the girl says no, she's raping the guy into not having sex. See if you can follow me here, the guy doesn't want to not have sex, but he's forced... Against his will... To not fuck her. If that's not reverse rape I don't know what is. And nobody is talking about it! Obviously it is a less extreme form of rape, but it's equal because it's much more common. You know who I feel sorry for? You guessed it: White men.

As a zoologist I was interested in determining what other mammals (besides white middle-class Americans) ate their own placentas and why they did it.36

heaven was placenta being born, hell.

All medications, including those in epidurals, reach your baby through the placenta, affecting his ability to find the breast, latch, and suck effectively after he’s born. Depending on how long the epidural was in place and the drugs used in it, these effects can last from a few days to a few weeks. Pain-relieving drugs reduce your own endorphins, which may increase your baby’s discomfort, both before the birth and after the birth, when more endorphins are passed on through your milk. Your baby may cry more. Or, without your natural endorphins, you and baby may feel “flatter” emotionally, making it harder for you to respond to each other. Epidurals can cause your temperature to rise, which raises your baby’s temperature. He may be sent to the nursery for observation and antibiotics in case he has an infection. And if an epidural or induction included hours of IV fluids, your normal breast and nipple shape may be distorted, making latching difficult even with skilled help. This can be hard information to read, but it’s what the research very clearly shows. As childbirth educator Linda Smith, IBCLC, comments, “If your friend tells you how she ‘loved her epidural,’ ask her how her first month of motherhood went.

The additional weight of the baby, placenta, amniotic fluid and maternal fluids will make everything a little bit harder on your body so be sure to take it easy and rest. The more well-rested you are, the more rested baby is too and that means the more prepared your body is to support baby's growth

One major drawback with being bipedal is coping with pregnancy. Pregnant mammals, four-legged or two-legged, have to carry a lot of extra weight not only from the fetus but also from the placenta and extra fluids. By full term, a pregnant human mother’s weight increases by as much as 7 kilograms (15 pounds). But

This can be true, although interestingly, it is usually tainted breast milk that is blamed for either “poisoning” a child and causing them to develop autism (or for -supposedly- causing autistic genes to be switched on), as opposed to anything that might have been passed to the fetus via the placenta during gestation. Regardless,

ERV envelope genes possess unique properties that make them suitable for use in forming the placenta: they are fusogenic proteins and they have immunosuppresive properties. Eutherian (placental) mammals distinguish themselves from nonplacental animals in the ability of the female to nurture the fertilized ovum and growing embryo within the body. The placenta is a transient tissue of embryonic origin whose evolution made it unnecessary to partition the embryo into a protective egg, which matured outside the mother's body. It serves two purposes for the maturing embryo: it is a conduit for respiratory gasses and nourishment supplied by the mother, and it provides an environment of immune tolerance. The fetus is necessarily half-foreign tissue, an allograft within the mother. It draws half of its genetic, and hence antigenic, identity from maternal and half from paternal genes. If the fetus is to mature within the mother, it must be isolated from the maternal immune system such that a graft-versus-host response does not reject it. The placenta forms early after implantation of the embryo. Syncytins mediate the formation of a continuous fused layer of cells around the embryo, isolating it from the mother, yet allowing essential nutrients to traverse from the mother's system. Although the observations on human syncytin-1 and -2 were compelling, it was left to scientists to definitively link syncytins to placental formation by studying mice. Here two syncytins (dubbed A and B) from murine ERVs were implicated, and genetic experiments with mice defective in these genes confirmed that their dysfunction disrupted placental formation. Notably, however, syncytin-A and -B were not syntenic with the human syncytins. That is, the human and mouse genes are not descended fron common ancestral syncytins; they have arisen by separate ERV gene capture events from different families of ERV in human and mouse ancestors.

I had long since wished that they would have been born with a dictionary sized how-to guide in my placenta. It would have been custom printed for each child by God. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. I’d been forced to walk through the minefield of parenthood feeling like I was blindfolded and hopping on one leg. Surely my kids should understand that I was trying to know what I was doing, but the verdict still seemed out at the moment.

«Hoy – dijo- el número de mujeres que da a luz a sus bebés y alumbra la placenta gracias a la liberación de un auténtico cóctel de hormonas del amor es prácticamente cero. ¿Qué ocurrirá en términos de civilización si continuamos así? ¿Qué ocurrirá después de dos o tres generaciones, si las hormonas del

The mother’s emotions, thoughts, and perceptions can cross the placenta in the form of hormones, reprograming and preparing how the child will adapt to his or her environment.46

Seeing the placenta as nebula a star-field of skin a chandelier from which we're all suspended flaring out from the same light.

To sum it up, exercising early in your pregnancy has a profoundly positive effect on your developing baby, as it stimulates placenta growth and function as well as the organs and systems of your baby. Staying active through the later stages of your pregnancy keeps your baby’s growth and development on track. All this good stuff happens with just 30 to 45 minutes of exercise a day.

In fact, women who exercise have better bloodflow to the placenta when they’re not exercising, so it’s likely beneficial for the baby’s development in the long run.

Mothers not only pass the harms of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on to their fetuses but on to even more distant generations. When a mother is exposed to EDCs, so too are her fetus's germ cells, which develop into eggs or sperm. "It's thought that during that exposure, the chemical can target those germ cells and do what we call reprogramming, or making epigenetic changes," says Flaws. "That can be a permanent change that gets carried through generations, because those germ cells will eventually be used to make the next generation, and those fetuses will have abnormal germ cells that would then go on to make the next generation." In the mid-20th century, scientists documented this in women who took a synthetic form of estrogen, called diethylstilbestrol or DES, to prevent miscarriages.? The drug worked as intended, and the women gave birth to healthy babies. But once some of those children hit puberty, the girls developed vaginal and breast cancer. The boys developed testicular cancer, and some suffered abnormal development of the penis. Scientists called them DES daughters and sons. "When those DES daughters and sons had children, we now have DES granddaughters and grandsons, and a lot of them have increased risk of those same cancers and reproductive problems," says Flaws. "Even though it was their great-grandmother that took DES and they don't have any DES in their system-their germ cells have been reprogramming, and they're passing down some of these disease traits." And now toxicologists are gathering evidence that mothers are passing microplastics and nanoplastics complete with EDCs and other toxic substances- to their fetuses. In 2021, scientists announced that they'd found microplastics in human placentas for the first time, both on the fetal side and maternal side.Later that year, another team of researchers found the same, and they also tested meconium-a newborn's first feces and discovered microplastic there too. Children are consuming microplastics, then, before they're even born.

Then, in 2018, researchers gathered three more observed cases of what might as well be called bonobo midwifery—this time in captivity, where observations were naturally easier (the bonobos were used to human beings being around, and the location of the births were more predictable and visible). In each case, other females gathered around the laboring bonobo, grooming her and standing guard. In a couple of cases, females even cupped their paws under the newborn as it came out of the mother, and again they all shared a bit of placenta as a bloody reward. This is, as the researchers note, entirely unlike the behavior of the chimpanzee, whether in the wild or in captivity, most likely—they plainly note—because chimpanzee society is male dominated, whereas bonobo society has strong female coalitions and is female dominated.

Nobody received creatine through the placenta; nobody was breastfed whey protein; you can always work out and become stronger than you currently are.

But forcing a woman to undergo nine months of incubation and labor is a rather obvious violation of her Thirteenth Amendment protections. I can prove that. After conception, the developing embryo is sustained by the woman’s ovum, or egg. This is why an embryo can be (relatively) easy to create and develop in a laboratory; it has something to eat. But embryos can’t live on personhood yolk forever, so the woman’s body starts building an entirely new organ, the placenta. When fully developed, by about the end of the first trimester, the placenta will leech nutrients from the woman’s bloodstream and “feed” it to the developing fetus through the umbilical cord. Legally, we treat the placenta as the woman’s, just like any other organ in her body. She has legal ownership of it, and that’s important, because after birth, there are some options for what to do with it. Some women eat it. Others freeze it or donate it to science, because emerging research suggests that placental cells can be useful in the treatment of certain childhood diseases. Most women allow the hospital to discard it.

The placenta is not alive, and never will be. The woman doesn’t need it. It seems to me that, if a woman is a person, she has the right to remove an unnecessary organ from her body. Certainly if the placenta malfunctions, as in the case of preeclampsia, which can cause liver or kidney damage, it would seem that the woman should have every right to remove this needless organ that is affecting her health. Nobody makes a constitutional case over an appendectomy. If I seem flippant about the whole thing, it is because the legal argument that a fetus has a legal status on par with the woman to whom it is literally attached is illogical trash sprinkled with bad faith and misogyny. Fetal personhood amendments are the state writing a check it cannot cash, then forcing women to cover the bill against their will. It cannot be done in a “free” society. The Thirteenth Amendment flatly prohibits forced labor, and it doesn’t have an exception for labor that white men won’t do themselves but think is really important for others to do for society. When it comes to amending the Constitution, conservatives still haven’t figured out how to grant personhood rights to all of the born people. If you think it’s really important for fetuses to become people, then, by all means, make one yourself.

When animals first evolved, they reproduced by laying eggs, and most creatures in the animal kingdom continue to give birth this way. Then, between 100 million and 200 million years ago, a shrew-like creature developed the capacity to gestate her young inside her own body—an extraordinary evolutionary advance because a fetus is much safer growing inside its mother’s body. It is only possible because of the placenta, a temporary organ that attaches to the uterus and allows nutrients and oxygen to pass from mother to baby, and carbon dioxide and waste to travel in the other direction, without provoking a devastating response from the mother’s immune system. There is nothing like this interface between the placenta and womb anywhere else in our bodies. When geneticists looked at the gene responsible for creating it, they realized that it was almost identical to those used by retroviruses to produce the proteins that attach to cells they are infecting without triggering an immune response.[24] The scientists concluded that a crucial function of the placenta didn’t emerge gradually as a result of evolution by natural selection but was suddenly acquired when a retrovirus inserted its DNA into our ancestor’s genome.

Of course, Hurt and other physicians make it a point to caution against cocaine use during pregnancy. Its effects are similar to those of tobacco. It can raise the blood pressure of expectant mothers to dangerous levels and even cause a pregnant woman’s placenta to tear away from her uterine wall. For those reasons, it’s associated with premature birth.

That was another secret between her and Jack, their confidential appointments with Max Jacobson, the German physician they called Dr. Feelgood. He shot them up with all kinds of drugs: speed, steroids, painkillers, animal hormones, bone marrow, human placenta. Neither Jack nor Jackie knew what, exactly, was in Feelgood’s injections. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” Jack once said. “It works.

In addition to X inactivation, long ncRNAs also appear to play a critical role in imprinting. Many imprinted regions contain a section that encodes a long ncRNA, which silences the expression of surrounding genes. This is similar to the effect of Xist. The protein-coding mRNAs are silenced on the copy of the chromosome which expresses the long ncRNA. For example, there is an ncRNA called Air, expressed in the placenta, exclusively from the paternally inherited mouse chromosome 11. Expression of Air ncRNA represses the nearby Igf2r gene, but only on the same chromosome12. This mechanism ensures that Igf2r is only expressed from the maternally inherited chromosome.

You forget how your soul was mixed at birth, since the day they ripped your placenta, mixed, your soul with clothes that conceal your genitals and reveal what may be seen of them. Of you and of women who have grown accustomed to ripping their own collars and hanging portraits on walls. Of boys who have trained themselves to draw on walls and gravestones and cars in junkyards and to march in your name, also, like a loaf! So your soul was mixed: homogenized, fermented, kneaded, baked and sold at stores that violated health codes, forged—and used for illegal purposes, voted on— and eaten like a loaf.

Knowledge (remember) You know enough to be able to recite knowledge by rote (e.g. you can recite the 15 causes of clubbing) Comprehension (understand) You understand the knowledge, so can explain it to others (e.g. you can explain what clubbing is) Application (apply) You can use the knowledge you have to solve problems (you use your knowledge of clubbing to try and work out why the patient in front of you has clubbed fingers) Analysis (analyse) You can use the knowledge you have to compare and contrast with other knowledge and see how it fits in with other people's assumptions and/or hypotheses (e.g. compare and contrast type 1 and type 2 diabetes; compare and contrast the electron as a particle and the electron as an electromagnetic wave) Synthesis (create) You can use knowledge, integrated with other knowledge, to produce new hypotheses (e.g. you know glucose crosses the placenta and that insulin does not; you know that in diabetes glucose tends to run high, so you hypothesise that the baby of a woman with diabetes will produce high levels of insulin itself and so will be at risk of going ‘hypo’ after birth) Evaluation (evaluate) You use your knowledge to assess, critique or judge others

By far the greatest numbers of our class are called placental (or eutherian) mammals. Humans, tigers, mice, blue whales – we all nourish our young in the same way. Our offspring undergo a really long developmental phase inside the mother, in the uterus. During this developmental stage, the young get their nourishment via the placenta. This large, pancake-shaped structure acts as an interface between the blood system of the foetus and the blood system of the mother. Blood doesn’t actually flow from one to the other. Instead the two blood systems pass so closely to one another that nutrients such as sugars, vitamins, minerals and amino acids can pass from the mother to the foetus. Oxygen also passes from the mother’s blood to the foetal blood supply. In exchange, the foetus gets rid of waste gases and other potentially harmful toxins by passing them back into the mother’s circulation.

A series of checks and balances ensures that neither the maternal nor the paternal genome gets the upper hand. We can get a better understanding of how this works if we look once again at the experiments of Azim Surani, Davor Sobel and Bruce Cattanach. These are the scientists who created the mouse zygotes that contained only paternal DNA or only maternal DNA. After they had created these test tube zygotes, the scientists implanted them into the uterus of mice. None of the labs ever generated living mice from these zygotes. However, the zygotes did develop for a while in the womb, but very abnormally. The abnormal development was quite different, depending on whether all the chromosomes had come from the mother or the father. In both cases the few embryos that did form were small and retarded in growth. Where all the chromosomes had come from the mother, the placental tissues were very underdeveloped1. If all the chromosomes came from the father, the embryo was even more retarded but there was much better production of the placental tissues2. Scientists created embryos from a mix of these cells – cells which had only maternally inherited or paternally inherited chromosomes. These embryos still couldn’t develop all the way to birth. When examined, the researchers found that all the tissues in the embryo were from the maternal-only cells whereas the cells of the placental tissues were the paternal-only type3. All these data suggested that something in the male chromosomes pushes the developmental programme in favour of the placenta, whereas a maternally-derived genome has less of a drive towards the placenta, and more towards the embryo itself.

The impact of imprinting varies from tissue to tissue. The placenta is particularly rich in expression of imprinted genes. This is what we would expect from our model of imprinting as a means of balancing out the demand on maternal resources. The brain also appears to be very susceptible to imprinting effects. It’s not so clear why this should be the case. It’s harder to reconcile parent-of-origin control of gene expression in the brain with the battle for nutrients we’ve been considering so far. Professor Gudrun Moore of University College London has made an intriguing suggestion. She has proposed that the high levels of imprinting in the brain represent a post-natal continuation of the war of the sexes. She has speculated that some brain imprints are an attempt by the paternal genome to promote behaviour in young offspring that will stimulate the mother to continue to drain her own resources, for example by prolonged breast-feeding

Mel was tugging at her T-shirt as Jack was handing her the baby. She held the baby’s cheek against her warm breast, running her fingers over his perfect head. The baby stopped crying and appeared to be looking around. Mel glanced up at Jack and gave him a little smile. “Come on, little guy,” she cooed, serene, totally focused on her son. “Do your job here. Stanch the bleeding, bring out the placenta.” She pinched her nipple to fit the baby’s mouth, trying to entice him with it. Jack felt a river of emotion run through him. He didn’t know if he was about to burst into song or faint. He dropped to his knees to be closer and watched Mel tickle the baby’s mouth and cheek with her nipple and then the baby turned his head instinctively and clamped on, took hold, suckled. And Mel said, “Oh, my! You’re very good at this.” Then she looked at Jack, who knelt by the bed, dazed. She smiled weakly and said, “Thank you, darling.” He leaned closer to her, his face next to his son’s head. “My God, Melinda,” he said in a breath. “What the hell did we just do?” *

Every Night I Die At Miyagis" would you like to be mine okay then, i'll be yours for just one day haha, just joking tell me when to start oh-oh, you're just playing hard to get yeah i know i've been told off in the world... off in the world the girls adjust i'm lost for words when you're sitting alone don't you know the boys will cry but not I i just want to see the smile on your face yes i see through all the trends let's be friends don't say no off in the world... off in the world the girls adjust i'm lost for words "i give dirty pussy to everyone! i crazy like gideon! ha ha i chomp on punani, bloody vagina me feast on placenta, placent-" give me what you are but oh no i'm not usually this way, i'm okay it just happens every time that i try did they make a life tonight i won't lie but i'm sold off in the world... off in the world the girls adjust i'm lost for words

Waiting for two minutes, or until the cord has stopped pulsating, before clamping, enables blood transfer from the placenta to the baby. This will make a big difference to a child’s long-term iron stores and is especially important for babies born to mothers with low iron themselves.66

Saying so might creep expectant mothers out, but you can make a good case that fetuses are parasites. After conception, the tiny embryo infiltrates its host (Mom) and implants itself. It proceeds to manipulate her hormones to divert food to itself. It makes Mom ill and cloaks itself from her immune system, which would otherwise destroy it. All well-established games that parasites play. And we haven’t even talked about the placenta.

Early suckling helps expel any fragments of placenta and stems post-natal bleeding; it also prevents engorgement, mastitis and abscesses which could lead to infection, septicaemia and death.

La palabra placebo proviene del latín, -al igual que placenta y placer-, y significa complacer. El efecto placebo remite a las posibilidades autocurativas que subyacen en el gran sistema formado por mente y cuerpo. Una persona enferma predispuesta a curarse absorberá todo estímulo positivo con gran provecho, todo lo contrario de lo que ocurriría si la persona se mostrara negada a mejorar su situación. Aunque en realidad placebo puede ser cualquier cosa, lo importante ocurre a través de la mente y de las creencias de la persona. Usualmente placebo es considerado en ambientes hospitalarios como una sustancia inocua, que administrada con la convicción de sus efectos curativos acabará generando esos mismos efectos. En el resultado del placebo influyen el ambiente, las personas que cuidan al enfermo y el propio enfermo, lo cual demuestra que el curso de una enfermedad puede verse influido por diversos factores. Incluso en la adquisición misma de la enfermedad y en su gestación influyen algo más que genética y carga hereditaria. El medio ambiente, los estímulos que una persona recibe, lo que haga con su vida, la capacidad que tenga para inferir en sus estados de ánimo, la autoaceptación, la sinceridad hacia sí misma y hacia los demás, etc,... todo influye en la adquisición de bienestar o de malestar. Los que consideran que el desarrollo de una enfermedad ya está programado genéticamente están pasando por alto el factor espiritual de la persona. A menos que consideremos que las creencias y la espiritualidad misma puedan ser agentes patógenos transmisibles hereditariamente. En las antípodas del efecto placebo está el efecto nocebo, palabra que indica que en nuestro interior puede fabricarse un impedimento, una enfermedad o la repetición de una experiencia no deseable. Las experiencias frustrantes crean un anclaje que condiciona nuestra respuesta posterior ante estímulos semejantes. A eso se le puede llamar efecto nocebo. Nuestras relaciones con los demás pueden generar efectos placebos o nocebos. Hay personas placebo y personas nocebo, las cuales vienen a nosotros atraidas por nuestra propia actitud. Incluso todo un medio ambiente puede resultar placebo o nocebo. En última instancia el que una experiencia genere un efecto placebo o nocebo depende de la elaboración personal que cada uno haga con su vida. Es la persona que convierte lo que le rodea en placebo o nocebo en función de su positividad o negatividad moral. Incluso una misma experiencia puede contener efectos placebos y nocebos entremezclados, lo cual remitiría a la ambigüedad quironiana subyacente en cada persona.

It is the only mosquito-borne virus that routinely crosses the placenta to kill or cripple babies. Scientists

You stole my placenta?

At the planning stage, he had suggested to Brook that a female figure should appear in the position of a ‘Sheila-na-gig’, a kind of ancient Irish stone carving of a woman with her knees more or less over her shoulders and her fingers pulling wide ‘a very large cunt’. The Irish name, he explained, meant ‘Woman of the Tits’. The giant phallus could perhaps, he thought, go up into the woman and then be seen on a ‘sort of spider’s web of veins, like the drapery of the placenta’.50

IgA can protect mucous membranes (like the lining of the digestive tract and the lining of the respiratory tract) from bacteria and viruses. That’s why breastfed babies are less likely to have diarrheal illnesses or colds in the first year. Most other diseases can be prevented with other types of antibodies. These protective antibodies can cross the placenta from the mother to the baby, but they cannot be passed in breast milk. That’s why breastfeeding can’t replace vaccination. Even if the mother is immune to whooping cough, for example, she can’t pass that immunity to her baby through breast milk. She can pass it through the placenta during pregnancy, but those antibodies will last in the baby’s bloodstream for only six months at the longest.

The origins of the placenta can be traced back to a virus.

You don't have to have shared a placenta with someone to sense their pain. Some would say that empathy is what makes us human. But I think empathy was here, an intuition. The thrumming awareness that we are all connected to the smallest speck, the most distant stars, by the great umbilicus of the solar system, the orbits tossing and tearing us with the force of the tides. When we pay attention to things like parasites and the moon, we are paying attention to the fact that we are citizens of the universe. Most of being human is an effort to forget.

We discovered that we shared a birthday, though she was two years behind me. She was enchanted by the coincidence, but I had just been told to expect them and thus had no reaction. The DJ probably had our birthday too. She confessed that meeting people with her birthday was jarring if they were younger, because she imagined them coming out of their mothers’ vaginas at the same moment she was eating her cake. She tried to will herself to stop imagining it but all she saw was icing and blood. “Cake, placenta, cake, placenta, cake, placenta.” I was exempt from this imagery because I was older. “Though,” she mused, “if you want to imagine me coming out of my mother’s vagina, I can’t stop you.” “Well, I wouldn’t want to ruin cake for myself.” “I wouldn’t want to ruin vaginas for myself.

De moederkoek, de placenta, is om te bespugen.

Who the fuck would try to steal a placenta?

Inside an H Mart complex, there will be some kind of food court, an appliance shop, and a pharmacy. Usually, there's a beauty counter where you can buy Korean makeup and skin-care products with snail mucin or caviar oil, or a face mask that vaguely boasts "placenta." (Whose placenta? Who knows?) There will usually be a pseudo-French bakery with weak coffee, bubble tea, and an array of glowing pastries that always look much better than they taste. My local H Mart these days is in Elkins Park, a town northeast of Philadelphia. My routine is to drive in for lunch on the weekends, stock up on groceries for the week, and cook something for dinner with whatever fresh bounty inspires me. The H Mart in Elkins Park has two stories; the grocery is on the first floor and the food court is above it. Upstairs, there is an array of stalls serving different kinds of food. One is dedicated to sushi, one is strictly Chinese. Another is for traditional Korean jjigaes, bubbling soups served in traditional earthenware pots called ttukbaegis, which act as mini cauldrons to ensure that your soup is still bubbling a good ten minutes past arrival. There's a stall for Korean street food that serves up Korean ramen (basically just Shin Cup noodles with an egg cracked in); giant steamed dumplings full of pork and glass noodles housed in a thick, cakelike dough; and tteokbokki, chewy, bite-sized cylindrical rice cakes boiled in a stock with fish cakes, red pepper, and gochujang, a sweet-and-spicy paste that's one of the three mother sauces used in pretty much all Korean dishes. Last, there's my personal favorite: Korean-Chinese fusion, which serves tangsuyuk---a glossy, sweet-and-sour orange pork---seafood noodle soup, fried rice, and black bean noodles.

There are cells throughout the body in specialised tissues with the beautiful name syncytium. They have multiple nuclei, formed when cells fuse with each other, which happens in the development of some muscle tissue, bone and heart cells. Syncytium in the placenta make up a highly specialised and essential tissue with the even more beautiful name syncytiotrophoblast. These are the spindly fingers from the growing placenta that invade the wall of the uterus and provide the interface between the mother and embryo, where liquids, waste and nutrients are exchanged. It’s also a tissue that suppresses the immune system of the mother, to stop her body automatically rejecting the growing child as an alien presence. These cells are at the junction of human reproduction, where one life is giving rise to the next. The genes that drive those placental cells to form are not human at all. Primates acquired them from a virus around forty-five million years ago;

sperm and an egg meet, called fertilization, to make one cell called a zygote. That zygote doubles (divides in two) over and over to achieve 36 doublings (236 cells) over 270 days of pregnancy for a total of 68 billion cells at birth; that averages doubling about every 7.5 days. This growth happens in the lowest oxygen environment imaginable (the placenta delivers to the fetus a partial oxygen pressure of 30 millimeters of mercury (30 mm Hg), compared to the 100 mm Hg that the lungs deliver to adult cells). So how do fetal cells grow so fast with so little oxygen?

ANTES DE NACER La microbiota de la madre desempeña un papel clave en la construcción de la microbiota del bebé. Ya antes de nacer, bacterias de la boca, del intestino y de la vagina de la madre llegan al feto a través de la placenta. Antes pensábamos que el ambiente intrauterino era estéril, pero hoy sabemos que no es así. Un hecho que lo confirma es la primera deposición del bebé, llamada meconio, cuyo estudio confirma la presencia de una microbiota diversa. El crecimiento y desarrollo del feto durante el embarazo están condicionados por el ambiente intrauterino y por la actividad de la placenta, que es la

I just found a strange-looking bag in the freezer and asked what it was, and he told me it was my placenta! I couldn’t believe it. He keeps everything. He said he was afraid that if he threw it away, the garbage men might see it and get suspicious.

The placenta is thought to be an impervious barrier, at least to most bacteria

When pregnant women scoop up cat litter and accidentally breathe in the particles, the parasite can find its way to their placentas. Like viruses, it can damage placental cells and cause them to commit suicide. The resulting condition, called toxoplasmosis, can lead to fetal infection, miscarriage, congenital disease, or disability later in life. This is why many pregnant women get their partners to empty the cat box for nine months.

Her enthusiasm for the organ is contagious. Enough to convince you that the alphabet posters in kindergarten classrooms should declare that "P" is for 'placenta'...

PROSTITUTION – AN ACT OF SEX (A POEM) BY E.T.H…AINA Hey young girl, Why do you want sex often and often? Oh! Dogs ate your placenta! And now your clitoris is always itchy. Hey little bro, why is your penis always nodding Like a read headed agama lizard? And you always want to insert it somewhere. Lemme open your eyes to some things. Girlie, to you, prostitution is just a practice Of engaging in sexual relations for payment or benefits. Hear this, prostitution is sexual harassment, Sexual exploitation, often worse. You become in your mind what your client does or says. It is internally damaging and disgraceful as he uses you to learn various sex patterns What he can’t do with the girl he truly loves. From Backstairs Boogy to Deep Impact, from the Head Game to Arc de Triomp And from Ladder Loving to the Pinwheel, from Electric Slide to Passion Propeller He uses you like a public convenience – a toilet After all, he pays for your ungodly service. After being used as a sex-slave, You’ll still suffer spiritually – what a pity. Girl, remember when the act of sex takes place, There is a spiritual union. Brotherly, hear this, he that has sex with a prostitute Becomes one body with her. He leaves a part of his DNA in her. Something a condom can’t protect you against. Back to you, young girl. You think sex is just pleasurable You moan – f**k me hard, give it to me, Baby Oh, I’m enjoying it. Oh, I’ve almost reached orgasm Then you cum and he cums – loba’tan! You think it’s over, right? You may not know – but he might be using you to enhance his wealth And your insufficient glory is depleting. Bro, you have done it, ten rounds. Champion! But what has gone out of you If only you have a spiritual eye – then you will be sober. Your sperm has been saved inside a black and red ritual calabash She will use it to boost her fame. Bro, it is finished! Wait, you think it is over, right? What if you contract diseases – chlamydia, HIV and AIDS If things fall apart, you tend to suffer on earth And fire will burn you in heaven. Na me talk ham – so, think ham oooo Copyright @2019 E.T.H…AINA All right reserved: no part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any forms or by any means, electronically, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the poet -E.T.H…AINA (hercules_temitope@yahoo.com)/+2348184171204

I made plans to eat my placenta to prevent postpartum depression and not waste any of that valuable, free nutrition (if you haven’t picked up on it by now, I’m extremely cheap).

A person eats another from hunger. But I fed myself with my own placenta. And I'm not going to bite my nails because this is a tranquil adagio.

Thóra glared at him. “I’ve given birth to two children, with all the accompanying pain, blood, placentas, cervical plugs, and God knows what else. I’ll survive.” She folded her arms and turned away from him. “So what do you know about gross stuff?” Matthew did not seem impressed by Thóra’s experience. “Lots of things. But I’ll spare you the details. Unlike you, I have no need to beat my chest.