Do Hospitals Sell Placentas for Profit?

Most hospitals in the United States and other Western countries do not directly sell placentas for profit in the way the question implies, but placental tissue does enter commercial supply chains, and the economics around it are not as transparent as many new parents expect. The default fate of a delivered placenta is disposal as medical waste, yet a growing industry processes donated or procured placental tissue into wound-care products, surgical grafts, and other medical devices worth thousands of dollars per unit. The gap between “thrown away for free” and “turned into a product billed to insurance” is where the real story lives.

What Normally Happens to a Placenta After Delivery

In a routine hospital birth, the placenta is delivered shortly after the baby, examined briefly by the attending clinician, and then placed in a biohazard container. If nothing looks abnormal, it is typically incinerated along with other pathological waste. In cases where a complication is suspected, the placenta may be sent to a perinatal pathology lab for formal examination. A survey of perinatal pathologists across multiple institutions found that about 61 percent did allow parents to request release of the placenta, and that the most common reason families asked for it was to bury it, though some requested it for consumption or encapsulation.¹ At institutions that did not routinely release placentas, the reason was usually that no one had asked, rather than a firm prohibition.

The key point is that, in most hospitals, the placenta is classified as biological waste once the clinical team is done with it. Hospitals do not typically have a line item on the maternity bill for “placenta sales.” But “discarded as waste” and “never enters a commercial pipeline” are not the same thing, because tissue banks and biotechnology companies have found ways to acquire placental tissue through donation agreements, procurement partnerships, and other arrangements that sit outside the patient’s hospital bill.

How Placental Tissue Enters the Commercial Pipeline

The commercial value of placental tissue comes not from selling whole placentas off a cart but from processing the membranes, amniotic fluid, and extracellular matrix into regulated medical products. Companies that specialize in regenerative medicine maintain relationships with hospitals and birthing centers, typically arranging for mothers to consent to donation of the placenta after a healthy delivery. The consent process varies by institution: some hospitals partner directly with a tissue-processing company, while others work through nonprofit tissue banks that then supply commercial processors.

Once acquired, the placenta is dissected under controlled conditions. The amnion (the thin innermost membrane) and the chorion (the outer membrane) are separated, cleaned, and processed into sheets, powders, or injectable preparations. These products are then sold to surgeons, wound-care specialists, and ophthalmologists. A single dehydrated amniotic membrane graft can be billed to insurance at well over a thousand dollars, depending on the product and the clinical indication. The companies that manufacture and sell these products are for-profit entities, many of them publicly traded, and they generate substantial revenue from placental-derived goods.

The mother who donated the placenta typically receives nothing for it. In most jurisdictions, tissue donation is legally structured so that the donor is not paid for the tissue itself, though a processing company may cover logistical costs. The profit is generated downstream, in the processing, sterilization, regulatory clearance, and distribution of the finished product. This is structurally similar to how blood and organ donation works: the donor gives for free, but hospitals, blood banks, and device companies charge for the processing and delivery of what the donor gave.

A History of Quiet Commerce

The idea of hospitals quietly profiting from placentas is not entirely a myth. Historically, in Western economies, placentas were sometimes sold by hospital midwives to pharmaceutical and cosmetics firms. One documented example involved sales to the French company Pasteur Mérieux, with the income generated used for improvements to the maternity unit or staff social events.² These arrangements were informal and largely unregulated. They happened in an era when bioethics oversight was far less developed, and the notion that a patient had rights over their biological waste was not widely established in law or hospital policy.

That informal market has largely disappeared in countries with modern tissue-banking regulations. In the United States, the FDA regulates placental tissue products as either human cells, tissues, and cellular and tissue-based products (HCT/Ps) or as biological drugs, depending on how much the tissue is manipulated during processing. This regulatory framework means that a hospital cannot simply hand off a bucket of placentas to the highest bidder the way some midwives historically did. Instead, procurement must follow tissue-banking standards, including informed consent from the donor, donor screening for infectious diseases, and documented chain-of-custody procedures. The commerce still exists, but it has been formalized and pushed into regulated tissue-processing companies rather than hospital supply closets.

What Placental Products Are Actually Used For

The medical applications of placental tissue are substantial and growing. Placental-derived biomaterials have been used in wound management for more than a century, and modern research has confirmed that they possess a combination of properties that make them unusually well-suited for tissue repair: they are biocompatible, biodegradable, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and they encourage new blood vessel formation.³ The extracellular matrix from a placenta can mimic the structure of native tissue, creating an environment that promotes cell migration and tissue remodeling.

In animal studies, placenta-derived scaffolds have shown the ability to support full-thickness wound healing, with treated wounds closing completely within four weeks and showing regeneration of both the outer and inner layers of skin, along with new hair follicles and blood vessels.⁴ Amnion scaffolds specifically have demonstrated faster wound closure in studies, with complete healing observed in seven days compared to 12 to 14 days for untreated controls, and they show promise for chronic wounds like diabetic ulcers and venous leg ulcers.⁵

Beyond wound care, placental membranes are used in eye surgery (to repair corneal defects and treat conditions like Stevens-Johnson syndrome), in orthopedic procedures to reduce scarring around tendons and nerves, and in dental surgery for tissue grafting. Some companies also market amniotic fluid preparations as injectable treatments for joint inflammation, though the evidence base for those uses is thinner and more contested. The breadth of clinical applications helps explain why the placental-tissue industry has grown into a multi-hundred-million-dollar sector, even though the raw material is something most hospitals used to throw away.

The Cosmetics Connection

Placental extracts were once a common ingredient in high-end skin creams and hair-care products, marketed with claims about rejuvenation and collagen stimulation. That market has shrunk considerably in Western countries, though it persists in parts of Asia. A safety assessment published by the Cosmetic Ingredient Review panel examined multiple placental ingredients, including human placental protein, hydrolyzed placental protein, placental enzymes, and placental lipids. Of the human-derived ingredients reviewed, only human placental protein was reported to still be in use at the time of the assessment.⁶ The European Union banned human-derived ingredients in cosmetics over concerns about transmissible spongiform encephalopathies and viral diseases like HIV.

Many cosmetics that currently advertise “placental” ingredients use animal-sourced placenta, typically from sheep, or plant-derived compounds branded with placental language. The regulatory crackdown on human-sourced ingredients means that if a hospital or tissue bank is supplying placental material to the cosmetics industry today, it is operating in a much smaller and more scrutinized niche than it would have been 30 or 40 years ago. The big money in placental commerce has shifted decisively toward medical devices and wound-care products, where reimbursement from insurance and Medicare creates a far more lucrative market than skincare ever did.

What Mothers Know and Feel About Placenta Use

One of the more uncomfortable aspects of placental commerce is how little most mothers know about it. A cross-sectional study of women in the Middle East and North Africa found that roughly two-thirds were unaware that donating their placenta for scientific research was even a possibility, and less than half knew about the benefits of using placentas in research. About a quarter said they would prefer to donate to medical research if given the option, while a similar proportion said they would simply want the placenta disposed of as medical waste.⁷

A study of postpartum women in Brazil found that about 78 percent supported the use of the placenta in research and medicine, and a similar share felt that their doctor should be the one to invite donation rather than a researcher approaching them directly. Roughly 72 percent said that knowing what happens to the placenta after birth was somewhat or very important to them, and about 59 percent felt that formal consent to collect the placenta was important.⁸ The picture that emerges is of a population that is broadly supportive of placental research and medical use but wants to be told what is happening and asked for permission.

That desire for transparency clashes with the reality in many hospitals, where the placenta’s fate is not routinely discussed unless the patient brings it up. If a hospital has a tissue-procurement agreement, information about it may appear in the general consent paperwork a patient signs on admission, buried among dozens of other provisions. Some institutions do a better job than others, and the quality of the consent process varies widely even within the same health system. The fact that most women in the surveys described above did not know donation was possible suggests that hospitals and tissue-procurement organizations have not done a particularly good job of making the process visible.

Can You Keep Your Own Placenta?

Yes, in most places, though you may have to be proactive about it. Hospital policies on placental release vary. The pathologist survey mentioned earlier found that the majority of responding institutions did allow it, usually with a written policy that required a parental signature and sometimes a sign-off from the attending physician.¹ Multiple departments within the hospital typically had input on the policy, reflecting the fact that releasing biological tissue involves infection-control considerations, liability questions, and pathology workflow.

If you want to keep your placenta, the practical advice is to ask your provider well before delivery, ideally during a prenatal visit. Some hospitals require advance arrangements, and some will not release a placenta that has been sent to pathology for clinical examination until the examination is complete, which can take days. If the placenta needs pathological evaluation for a medical reason, that takes priority over your request. A few states have specific regulations or guidelines on placental release; in others, it falls to hospital policy. Birthing centers and home-birth midwives are generally more accommodating about this than large hospital systems, partly because the regulatory and liability environment is different.

If your main concern is preventing the hospital from profiting off your placenta without your knowledge, requesting release is the most direct route. But even if you do not want to take it home, you can ask your care team whether the hospital has any tissue-procurement agreements and whether your consent forms include provisions for placental tissue collection. You have the right to know, and asking the question often surfaces information that would not otherwise be volunteered.

The Fraud Problem in Placental Products

The rapid growth of the placental-tissue industry has attracted not just legitimate companies but also bad actors. In recent years, the FDA has issued warning letters and taken enforcement actions against companies marketing amniotic and placental products with unsupported claims, particularly injectable products marketed for joint pain, cosmetic purposes, or anti-aging. Some of these products were being sold as minimally manipulated tissue when, in the FDA’s view, they had been processed to the point of being unapproved biological drugs.

Medicare billing fraud has also been a significant issue. Because amniotic-tissue wound-care products can command high reimbursement rates, some providers and distributors were caught overbilling, applying products to patients who did not need them, or misrepresenting what was applied. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services tightened coverage rules for skin-substitute products partly in response to these patterns. For patients, this means that the commercial incentives around placental tissue are not always aligned with clinical need, and it is worth asking your clinician whether a recommended placental graft is the standard of care for your condition or a high-margin option among several alternatives.

Cultural and Religious Dimensions of Placenta Disposal

The question of who “owns” a placenta and what should be done with it is not purely a medical or legal one. Many cultures and religious traditions assign deep significance to the placenta. In numerous indigenous communities around the world, the placenta is considered a spiritual companion to the child and is ceremonially buried, sometimes with a tree planted above it. Some Māori families in New Zealand, for example, bury the placenta on ancestral land as a way of connecting the newborn to place and lineage. In parts of Southeast Asia, the placenta is washed, wrapped, and buried with specific rituals believed to protect the child’s health.

These practices intersect uncomfortably with hospital protocols that treat the placenta as waste. For families with cultural or spiritual reasons to retain the placenta, the default assumption that it will be incinerated can feel dismissive or even harmful. The growing awareness of these concerns is one reason more hospitals have developed formal release policies. It is also a reason why the idea of hospitals profiting from tissue that families consider sacred provokes a particularly strong reaction. The ethical landscape here is not just about informed consent in the narrow legal sense but about respecting the fact that different communities understand the placenta in fundamentally different ways, and that framing it as disposable raw material is itself a cultural stance rather than a neutral medical fact.

For families navigating this, the practical step is the same regardless of whether your concern is commercial, spiritual, or both: tell your provider early what you want done with your placenta, get the policy in writing, and do not assume the default will match your wishes.