Wow, I can’t believe a whole month has passed since our wonderful success with the hospital placenta situation here in Las Vegas.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I have not been taking it easy and relaxing! I have been working hard on a whole new update to the PBi site, as well as putting the finishing touches on a major project that has been in the works since September last year.

Do you want to try placenta capsules, but wish there were someone in your area to prepare the placenta for you when you have your baby? Or do you want to start offering placenta encapsulation services to women in your community, but don’t know where to start?

I urge you to stay tuned - I will soon be sending out all the details for the incredibly exciting Certification & Training program I’ve developed.

Erin Martinez received her placenta this morning from Sunrise Hospital. We held a celebratory rally out front of the hospital in honor of the occasion, and presented the nursing staff with flowers, balloons and a Thank You card. The hospital had told her she would need a court order, but then reversed their decision once she filed the paperwork and learned of our plans to rally in protest of their policy on placenta release.

Not only did the hospital release her placenta to her, without making her go before the judge, but they are revising their guidelines as it pertains to placenta release! The hospital spokeswoman called me Friday morning to let me know that they will now be releasing healthy placentas to women upon request.

This is wonderful news for postpartum women in Las Vegas. Every mother should have the right to care for her baby’s placenta in whatever manner she sees fit. And now we have one less hospital standing in their way of doing so.

Placentas play such an important role in bringing new life into this world, that it really seems disgraceful that we let them be treated merely as medical waste to be disposed of. This brings us one step closer to bringing honor to this incredible connection to the circle of life.

Viva la placenta!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 4, 2008
Contact: Jodi Selander
Placenta Benefits, Ltd.
702.947.0879
PR@placentabenefits.info

UNDER PRESSURE, SUNRISE HOSPITAL REVERSES STANCE
– Hospital to Release Placenta After Forcing Mother to Obtain Court Order –

LAS VEGAS, NV - A triumphant group of mother advocates will gather near Sunrise Hospital on Monday, April 7, at 10 a.m. to stand up for a woman’s right of ownership to her baby’s placenta. Most hospitals in the Valley support a mother’s right to take the placenta after giving birth - Sunrise and North Vista have been the unfortunate exceptions.

Erin Martinez delivered her baby at Sunrise Hospital in late March. Sunrise Hospital told her she would need a court order before they would release her baby’s placenta. They had given her two weeks to do so before they would destroy the placenta Monday April 7, 2008.

Thursday, April 3, Sunrise Hospital notified Martinez’s lawyers that they would instead be releasing the placenta to her. The rally will celebrate the hospital’s sudden decision to honor the requests by healthy mothers for healthy placentas. If Sunrise does indeed change its policy, they will join the ranks of other mother-friendly hospitals, which include Summerlin, St. Rose, Spring Valley, Southern Hills and Mountain View. The lone dissenter remains North Vista Hospital.

The rally will take place nearly a year after a similar rally supporting Anne Swanson. Swanson’s placenta was eventually returned, following a decision by Judge Susan Johnson in the case of Swanson vs. Sunrise Hospital, July 2007.

Placenta encapsulation has become popular in the Las Vegas Valley, a practice that has a long history of providing postpartum benefits to mothers. Many women find that placenta capsules help them avoid the “baby blues”, have more energy, increase their milk production, and recover more quickly from the pregnancy and birth.

The state of Hawaii guarantees mothers the right to take the placenta from hospitals. Advocates in Nevada are preparing similar legislation for the upcoming legislative session.

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I am so excited to write that Sunrise Hospital has decided to release the placenta to the mother! Our press release: DESPITE COURT RULING, SUNRISE HOSPITAL NOT MOTHER-FRIENDLY, was sent out yesterday, and today the mother filed the paperwork for an injunction to stop them from destroying the placenta. The paperwork also included her complaint, and intent to appear before the court forcing them to return the placenta to her.

Today, the lawyer working on the case called the hospital to see if they would accept service, or if they preferred to be served in person. They responded by saying that they would RELEASE THE PLACENTA, if the mother signs a detailed liability form. Of course she is willing to do so, she asked to do so from the very beginning.

This is a brilliant turn of events, and I could not be happier.

We will still hold a celebratory rally on Monday, April 7, 10am, outside Sunrise Hospital, in a show of support for their recent decision to join the long list of hospitals in the Las Vegas Valley who release placentas without issue. Further details to follow…

Ok, survey fans - here’s another one for you. This comes to us from Kim Wildner, author of Mother’s Intention: How Belief Shapes Birth, and the Fearless Birthing blog.

From her blog:
“I am trying to determine why women watch what they watch in pregnancy. I want to know what makes some people watch Maternity Ward and others The Business of Being Born. I want to know how they conclude if a source of information is biased or unbiased, and how they decide if a movie has a positive or negative message.
I can only take the first 100 responders, but I need to have the data by Friday, April 11th, 2008.”

This has nothing to do with placenta, but it is definitely a women’s health issue. Please take a few minutes to watch this video, even if you have heard of Inflammatory Breast Cancer, or IBC. It has pictures of what you can look for, since this aggressive form of cancer does not have the “lumps” we’re all told to watch for.

Sunrise Hospital has once again refused to give a young couple their baby’s placenta. The parents were told they have two weeks to produce the court order or the hospital will be tossing it into a big bin with all the other placentas to await its inevitable incineration. This is a living organ, one that nurtured and brought new life into this world, and which is very much wanted by the parents. Yet the hospital feels it has the right to destroy it, and can deny the parents the right to take care of it in the manner they see fit.

I feel the need to state the obvious here - THEY ARE WRONG.

Sunrise and North Vista are the only two hospitals in the Las Vegas area who are refusing to release placentas, without a court order. Every other hospital takes a reasonable stance on this issue, giving healthy placentas to healthy mothers.

I actually feel the need to thank Sunrise here, since they are the impetus for this blog. A year ago, they refused to give Anne Swanson her placenta, a decision which gave rise to my initial activism for parents’ rights, the first Placenta Rally, the petitions, the legal defense fund, and the blog. (Search the blog or visit the archives from April and May 2007 for details about that.)

Oh yeah, they reported me to the health department and the FDA. Thanks for that, too. Nothing like a massive over-reaction to a woman using natural, time-tested remedies to help herself feel better after having a baby.

We’re in the planning stages of a response to this latest development. It is actually the 4th time they have refused to release placentas since losing their last case (Swanson vs. Sunrise), and they continue to test the court’s judgment in this matter, to the detriment of new mothers. This just happens to be the first woman since Swanson who will be fighting for what is rightfully hers. Stay tuned!

Today is the Vernal Equinox for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, when day and night are once again equal. I am glad to be at this part of the year where the sun shines a bit longer each day. Bring on the sunshine!

Easter is always the first Sunday after the Equinox, which means it happens very early this year. In fact, this will be the earliest Easter any of us will live to see! Pretty amazing.

I received a newsletter today that explained how to color Easter eggs with natural, plant-derived coloring. It looks like fun! We’re visiting my in-laws this weekend, so I’ve been relegated to the sidelines for this years’ festivities, as Grandma has the whole plan under control (fine by me, since I get to blog instead of packing little plastic eggs with treats and prizes!). As a result, I’m not going to be able to test these methods for myself, but I wanted to share it anyway. Let me know how it works if you try it.

Have a wonderful weekend, however you celebrate this holiday.

Telemundo Network, which is the Spanish affiliate for NBC, was here today for an interview. I thought they were just going to do a quick piece on placentophagy, but they were here for nearly four hours. They wanted to know everything about the benefits of placenta, the encapsulation process, and the current trend toward placenta ingestion. They even took a lot of footage of my Placenta Encapsulation Kits, where I give women the supplies and detailed instructions of the encapsulation process so a woman (or her husband, mother, friend) can prepare the placenta in her own kitchen after the birth.

Marcy, one of my wonderful bilingual clients, agreed to give an interview on how well the placenta capsules helped her after her son was born 4 months ago. She had suffered some pretty severe postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter two years previous, and she wanted to use the placenta capsules for her postpartum recovery this time. She had a much better experience with the placenta capsules. She suffered a relapse a few months after she stopped taking the capsules, and she began taking them again on the advice of her midwives. She was told that if she didn’t show some improvement quickly that she’d have to go on antidepressants. She was grateful to find that she was feeling better after taking the placenta capsules for just two days.

Marvelys Lopez, a local homebirth midwife (previously an OB in Venezuela) was interviewed for the story as well. She has seen the benefits of placenta with many of her clients, and was happy to lend her support.

Thank you to Telemundo for taking such a sincere interest in this important topic. I look forward to seeing the final footage, and trust that it will be presented in a way that will benefit mothers. I am so grateful to Marvelys and Marcy for taking time out of their day to devote to this story. I truly appreciate your support.

Special thanks to my awesome friend and neighbor Devorah, for taking my girls to the park so that I could do the interview. It’s pretty important to be able to string two sentences together without the kids running amok in the background!

I was invited by the Hormones & Diseases Research and Resource Group to give a “brown bag lecture” on placentophagy at UNLV today (University of Nevada, Las Vegas). It went really well - I was told that they had their best turnout ever. It was standing room only, and I ran out of handouts (sorry folks, I was expecting a smaller crowd).

Beyond being pleased that my PowerPoint presentation went off without a hitch, and that I got a few laughs (at the parts where I was actually trying to be amusing), there were three researchers there who are interested in working on some placentophagy research with me! That is incredibly exciting.

The research potential for placentophagy is huge, as it is a field that is vastly unexplored. The interested experts - from anthropology, nutritional anthropology and psychology - can explore placentophagy on several different fronts. Now just to work out the logistics for the first study and find some funding!