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“I was having a tougher time toward the end of my pregnancy because I was just exhausted,” she said.
She contacted Kelly Bottari of Empowering Presence Doula in Belchertown, one of two people in the area who specialize in placenta encapsulation. Shortly after Jacobsen’s daughter Nova was born in December, Bottari went to their home and made the pills Jacobsen has been taken daily since.
“As a new, nursing mother, you need all the nutrients you can get,” Jacobsen said. “With four other children running around, I really can’t spend time feeling low-energy.”
>f >f<“I feel like my recovery this time has been the easiest of my five and I have felt stressed, yes, but not depressed.” >BodySubheadLeft<>eld<>f< Nourishes, cleanses >grid When the placenta detaches from the uterus, it leaves behind a wound, so there is blood loss and that can lead to an iron deficiency, says Laura Fortin, who also makes placenta pills through her business Crimson Roots in Holyoke. “Iron deficiency can also cause fatigue and then fatigue contributes to the blues or postpartum depression,” she said. The placenta is rich in nutrients and minerals, including iron, so, taking it as a supplement can help, Fortin says. Certified nurse-midwife Amy Richane of Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton says that may be true. But, she adds, consuming any animal protein would boost iron, and there is no proof that the placenta works better than, say, beef bone broth. Still, some patients report that placenta capsules help stabilize their emotions, says Richane, and she doesn’t discount that. “Even though placenta encapsulation doesn’t have a strong body of research, I think all of us are in favor of things that work for people,” she said. “We as a practice would support, with proper counseling, people finding creative solutions to things.” Some, like researchers from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, advise caution. A 2015 article in the medical journal Women’s Mental Health reported that waste filtered by the placenta in utero could contain potentially dangerous substances like cadmium, mercury and lead, as well as bacteria. It is not known, the researchers said, whether such toxins could cause harm to the mother or nursing baby. Now halfway through her bottle of placenta capsules, Jacobsen says she never had any hesitations about taking them. Typically, the placenta is delivered right after the baby and is disposed of with other hospital waste. However, a women can choose to take it home, after testing negative, for infectious diseases, says Richane. In her experience, those women are in a small minority, though interest in the practice has been growing over the past few years, she says. Sukey Krause, a certified nurse-midwife and the director of the Midwifery Education Program at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield says she, too, finds it unusual for women to ask about preserving their placentas, though she points out that humans are one of the only mammals that do not consume them. A quick internet search will reveal that there is no shortage of recipes that incorporate placenta, such as smoothies. >BodySubheadLeft<>kern<>f Melissa Carreira, 37, of Wilbraham is another woman who chose to use her placenta as a nutritional supplement. She says she learned about placenta pills through River Valley Midwives in Northampton three years ago when she became pregnant with her son Maddox. She said she was told that taking the capsules could increase milk supply and improve her mood. She also learned that she could freeze some pills and take them to relieve symptoms of menopause when the time comes. >kern<“I thought, you know this seems natural, let’s do it,” she said. “You hear about a lot of people going on anti-depressants afterward. I don’t want to do that.”>kern< Only six weeks after giving birth, she says, she was out playing guitar and singing with her band, The Kings. There were no mood swings or baby blues. “You hear horror stories about postpartum depression, I didn’t see that in Melissa at all,” says her husband Joe Carreira, 41. Never having been pregnant before, however, she had no way to tell whether the pills had any effect on the good health she enjoyed after Maddox was born. >kern >f “We don’t recommend it or not recommend it, it’s about what they want,” she said. >BodySubheadLeft<>kern<>f To turn the placenta into pills, placenta encapsulation specialists like Bottari and Fortin first go to the client’s house just a day or two after the woman gives birth. The placenta is steamed with ginger and lemon, a traditional Chinese method to balance the energy in the placenta, before it is placed in a dehydrator overnight, and then ground into a powder. Sometimes the powder is mixed into a salve to moisturize the skin or turned into a tincture, which can be taken in droplets on the tongue. >f Bottari, who also serves as a doula, guiding women through all aspects of birth, says she has provided placenta pills to women throughout the Pioneer Valley for the past two years. Most of her clients come to her through from word of mouth, she says. Fortin, who has been running her business for eight years, estimates that she has encapsulated 200 placentas. There are how-to guides on the internet on the process and some for-profit companies have sprung up around the country that offer training and certification. Fortin took an online course with an organization called Placenta Benefits of Las Vegas. Bottari got certification through ProDoula of Peekskill, New York. >kern Both women are certified in infection control and bloodborne pathogens by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is also a requirement for the ProDoula certification. There are no federal or state regulations around using placentas as nutritional or medical supplements. Dietary supplement manufacturers and distributors are not required to obtain approval from the federal Food and Drug Administration, according to the agency’s website. In addition to using their placentas for health purposes, some women decide to make art or keepsakes out of them. Some have prints made, creating an impression of the veins, which resemble the shape of a tree. Others dry out a segment of the umbilical cord to hold onto as a memento. “It is kind of an incredible organ,” said Richane. “I could understand why someone would want to dispose of it in a way that is really special.” >italic >InfoboxHead<>f >InfoboxTextIndent<>bold<>kern >InfoboxTextIndent<>kern >InfoboxTextIndent<>bold<>kern >InfoboxTextIndent<>kern >InfoboxTextIndent<