Is eating human placenta canabilism (sp?)?

Google it! It's common (to my suprise).

Apparently it helps with PND...

Yuck!

It's cannibalistic for sure. Probably damn tasty too if cooked right, though I'm not keen to try it.

Let us know how it goes.

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No , not canabalism.

And if eating human shit is canabalistic then so is drinking breast milk,hmmm?

Still, I doubt I will be trying it in a hurry

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Diaz, how do you differentiate between secretion and waste product. Mucus in the nose is often a waste product, well when it reaches the stage of coming out. If you bite your tongue and it bleeds, of course you will consume some of the blood, but is that cannibalism? It becomes a bit different if the part you are eating is no longer needed for bodily function. The most interesting example I found in nature is the sea squirt, which digests its own brain after attaching to rocks and becoming stationary.

Eating your placenta though... yeah, kinda gross. Consumption of placenta probably correlates highly with not having PND because it also correlates highly with as crazy or tough as hell. Damn, I wouldn't mess with a woman willing to chow down on her own afterbirth.

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The placenta does become redundant after the birthing process has been completed, and every time pregnancy starts again another one is produced. Faecal matter also contains transport substances to ease the passing of waste, same with urine, the body doesn't need to get rid of the water, but it does so because otherwise it couldn't get rid of the waste involved (I'm assuming this here, but I'm pretty sure its right, feel free to correct). I would generally find it hard to term non-damaging auto-cannibalism really as proper cannibalism. Wikipedia (unreliable source to begin with) says that any self ingestion is included in this term including swallowing hair, nails, etc. I'd say that placenta is on the borderland of auto-cannibalism, given that unlike most forms of intentional auto-cannibalism it is not self damaging, the part that is consumed was not forcibly and unnaturally removed from the body.

So technically yes, it is cannibalism by the truest definition of the word. But whether or not it is the same as we perceive cannibalism to normally be... basically eating people, it would be much more up for debate.

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Heh, I am glad every day that I don't have to go through child birth to have a child. I really don't know how you girls willingly do it, that instinct must be pretty well embedded deep, all respect to you.

But no matter how it comes out, it is still a natural part of child birth. The organ is discarded by the body as no longer of use. So in that sense eating it is not at the same "level of cannibalism" as say eating a kidney, or a slice of flesh, or even a removed appendix.

But then it is still a higher form than unintentionally eating/digesting blood, dead skin cells, hair, nails, etc.

As far as semantics go... "(n) cannibalism (the practice of eating the flesh of your own kind)". Hmmm actually not what I was expecting, given that it only seems to include flesh in this definition from Princeton.