What Do People Do With Their Placenta After Birth?

Most placentas delivered in hospitals are treated as medical waste and incinerated or disposed of through regulated pathways, but a growing number of families choose to take theirs home. What they do with it varies enormously: some bury it in a ceremonial spot, some have it encapsulated into pills, some leave it attached to the newborn, and some donate it for medical use in wound-healing products. Each option carries its own mix of cultural meaning, claimed health benefits, and real safety considerations.

What Happens at the Hospital by Default

In most Western hospital settings, the placenta has historically been classified as medical waste and discarded after delivery, unless there is a medical reason to examine it further.¹ This default pathway means the organ is handled like any other tissue removed during a procedure. In the United States, the Joint Commission’s standards state that tissue removed from the body must be submitted to the pathology department, with any exceptions spelled out in hospital policy.² Some hospitals routinely send placentas for pathological examination when complications arise during pregnancy or delivery, such as preterm birth, infection, or growth restriction. In those cases, the tissue is preserved, sectioned, and studied under a microscope to help explain what went wrong.

If you want to take your placenta home, you generally need to let your care team know ahead of time. Policies vary by state and by hospital. Some facilities release the placenta readily after signing a waiver; others refuse or require that a pathologist examine it first and then return what remains. The practical tension here is real: once the placenta leaves the hospital, it is no longer available for pathological examination if questions about the birth come up later.² That trade-off is worth thinking through, especially if the birth was complicated.

Burial, Ceremony, and Cultural Traditions

For many indigenous and traditional communities around the world, the placenta is far from waste. An integrative review of placental disposal practices among indigenous groups found that ceremonies and rituals surrounding the placenta are widespread, reflecting the organ’s sacred significance in many cultures.³ Burial is one of the most common practices. In Māori tradition, the word for placenta, “whenua,” is the same word used for land, and the organ is buried to connect the child to their ancestral territory. In parts of Southeast Asia, families bury the placenta near the home, sometimes with symbolic objects. Some West African traditions involve washing and burying the placenta with specific prayers. In parts of Central America, the burial site and manner are believed to influence the child’s character or fortune.

These traditions are not relics of the past. Many families living in modern cities still follow them, sometimes navigating hospital bureaucracy to do so. The growing movement in Western countries to “reclaim” the placenta often draws, at least in framing, on this longstanding reverence, even though the specific motivations and practices differ considerably.

Eating It

The practice of consuming one’s own placenta after birth, called placentophagy, has surged in popularity over the past decade or so, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The placenta can be eaten raw, cooked into dishes, blended into smoothies, made into tinctures, or, most commonly, steamed, dehydrated, ground into powder, and packed into capsules.² Numerous small companies now offer encapsulation services, though there are no uniform standards for the process.²

Women who choose placentophagy commonly cite reasons including boosting energy, improving milk supply, preventing postpartum depression, and replenishing hormones and nutrients lost during birth. Some frame the decision in spiritual terms, seeing the practice as honoring the organ that sustained their baby.⁴ Celebrity endorsements and social media have helped normalize the practice, and many advocates point to the fact that most other mammals eat their afterbirth.

That comparison to other mammals is worth unpacking. Research on nonhuman mammals shows that afterbirth ingestion does have measurable effects in those species, including enhanced mother-infant interaction and activation of brain opioid circuits linked to caregiving behavior.⁵ But there is a catch: those animals consume the placenta raw, immediately after delivery, in quantities and circumstances nothing like swallowing a few dehydrated capsules days later. Whether the same biology translates to humans under typical encapsulation conditions is a different question entirely.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

The claimed benefits of eating your placenta are not supported by the clinical evidence available so far. The most rigorous study to date was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot trial with 27 participants. Women consumed either capsules made from their own processed placenta or similarly prepared placebo capsules, and researchers assessed mood, bonding, and fatigue at multiple time points during late pregnancy and early postpartum. No significant differences were detected between the two groups on any of those measures.⁶ The sample was small, but it is the only blinded trial that exists, and the absence of any detectable effect is telling.

Part of the reason the health claims are shaky comes down to what actually survives the encapsulation process. Research measuring hormone concentrations in processed placenta found that while steroid hormones and melatonin were detectable in the final capsules, the question of whether those hormones are biologically active once swallowed is another matter.⁷ Protein-based hormones are broken down during digestion, which likely strips them of any function before they reach the bloodstream. Any effect from steroid hormones would depend on whether enough survives to make a physiological difference, and current evidence does not demonstrate that it does.⁸

The nutritional value of placenta capsules is similarly modest. An analysis of trace minerals in encapsulated placenta found that a recommended daily serving would provide roughly a quarter of the iron a lactating woman needs, about seven percent of selenium, and negligible amounts of zinc and copper.⁹ That iron content is real but unimpressive compared to a standard supplement, and it comes alongside trace amounts of potentially harmful elements like arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury, though the concentrations measured were well below toxicity thresholds.⁹

Safety Concerns With Placentophagy

Beyond the lack of demonstrated benefit, there are real safety risks. The most alarming documented case involved a newborn in Oregon who developed a recurrent Group B Streptococcus (GBS) blood infection. The mother had been consuming capsules made from her own placenta. When the capsules were cultured, they yielded GBS that was genetically indistinguishable from the bacteria causing the infant’s infections. Investigators concluded that consuming the contaminated capsules likely increased the mother’s GBS colonization, which then transferred to the baby.² The CDC case report noted that the encapsulation process does not reliably eradicate infectious pathogens.

That said, the broader microbiological picture is not as alarming as a single case report might suggest. A study examining how tissue processing affects bacterial colonization found that the results did not support processed placental tissue as a likely source of clinical infection in most circumstances.¹⁰ The tension between these findings makes sense: steaming and dehydration reduce bacterial counts substantially, but they cannot guarantee sterility the way pharmaceutical-grade manufacturing would. Since placenta encapsulation is unregulated, there is no oversight ensuring that preparers follow consistent protocols or that temperature and processing time are adequate.

Both the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advise against placentophagy, citing unregulated production and potential health risks.¹¹ If you are considering it, that is worth knowing. Many women report feeling better after taking placenta capsules, but placebo effects are powerful, especially in the emotionally heightened postpartum period, and the only controlled trial found no difference between placenta and placebo.

Lotus Birth

A less common but growing practice is lotus birth, in which the umbilical cord is not clamped or cut after delivery. Instead, the placenta stays attached to the baby, and the cord is left to dry and separate on its own, which usually takes several days to over a week.¹² During this period, the placenta is carried alongside the baby, often wrapped in cloth and treated with salt or herbs to reduce odor and slow decomposition.

Families who choose lotus birth often describe it as a gentler, more natural transition for the newborn. The concern from a medical standpoint is infection. Dead tissue attached to a living baby is, in principle, an infection risk, and case reports have documented neonatal omphalitis, an infection of the umbilical stump, following lotus birth.¹² A small case series, however, followed six lotus births and found no infections among them, though half the families ended up cutting the cord before leaving the hospital.¹³ The evidence base is too thin to draw firm conclusions about how often complications actually occur. What is clear is that the practice is not recommended by mainstream obstetric guidelines, and if you pursue it, close monitoring for signs of infection is essential.

Medical Uses of Donated Placentas

While the personal uses of placenta get most of the public attention, the organ has a well-established role in medicine that predates the encapsulation trend by many decades. Placental membranes, specifically the amnion and chorion layers, have been used in wound management for over a century. These tissues have properties that make them remarkably useful for healing: they are biocompatible, biodegradable, and possess anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial characteristics.¹⁴

In modern applications, donated placentas are processed into various products. Dehydrated human amnion and chorion allografts are used to treat chronic wounds, including diabetic foot ulcers. In one clinical study, these placental membrane products healed ninety percent of diabetic foot wounds at twelve weeks, compared to forty percent in a comparison group treated with a tissue-engineered skin substitute.¹⁵ Researchers have also developed more experimental dermal substitutes by processing the placenta’s extracellular matrix into porous sheets. In animal models, these sheets supported full-thickness wound healing, restoring both the top and deeper layers of skin and even promoting the formation of new hair follicles and blood vessels.¹⁶

These medical products are regulated, processed under controlled conditions, and backed by clinical evidence, which sets them sharply apart from the unregulated encapsulation market. If you donate your placenta to a tissue bank (typically arranged through the hospital before delivery), the tissue goes through rigorous screening and processing before it becomes a product that helps heal someone else’s wound. It is one of the more concretely useful things that can happen with a placenta after birth.

Stem Cell Banking

Most people have heard of cord blood banking, the practice of collecting and storing hematopoietic stem cells from the umbilical cord for potential future medical use. The placenta itself also contains stem cells, including both hematopoietic stem cells and mesenchymal stem cells, and there is growing interest in banking placental tissue alongside cord blood to expand the pool of useful cells that can be collected from a single birth.¹⁴ The idea is that these cells could be used therapeutically in the future, either on their own or combined with the cord blood cells, laying the groundwork for clinical trials in regenerative medicine.

Private banking companies already offer placental tissue storage as an add-on to cord blood banking, marketing it as a kind of biological insurance policy. Whether the investment pays off depends on how quickly placental stem cell therapies move from the lab to clinical use, and right now most applications remain experimental. Public cord blood donation, by contrast, makes collected cells available for anyone who needs a stem cell transplant and is a match. If you are interested in banking, it is worth understanding the difference between private storage (for your family’s potential future use, at a cost) and public donation (free, but the cells go to a general registry).

Placental Extracts in Cosmetics

Placental extracts have been used in skincare products for decades, particularly in parts of Asia. These products typically use animal-derived placental tissue rather than human placenta, and the extracts are marketed as anti-aging ingredients. A single-blind comparative study of a cream containing horse placental extract found a reduction in wrinkle depth and number around the eye area compared to untreated skin.¹⁷ Whether placental extract performs better than other well-studied anti-aging ingredients is harder to say, since head-to-head comparisons are scarce.

The cosmetics angle is worth mentioning because it highlights just how wide the range of placenta uses has become. A single organ can end up incinerated as hospital waste, buried in a backyard ceremony, swallowed as a capsule, left attached to a newborn for a week, processed into a wound-healing product, frozen in a stem cell bank, or blended into a wrinkle cream. The scientific evidence behind each of these paths varies from robust (wound-healing biomaterials) to essentially nonexistent (lotus birth safety data), and the regulatory oversight ranges from strict pharmaceutical-grade manufacturing to your neighbor’s kitchen dehydrator. If you are making a decision about your own placenta, knowing where on those spectrums each option falls is more useful than the testimonials.

1
PubMed. Placental release or disposal? Experiences of perinatal pathologists
2
American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Human placentophagy: a review
3
PubMed Central. The Disposal of Placenta among Indigenous Groups Globally: An Integrative Literature Review
4
European Journal of Women’s Studies. The placenta economy: From trashed to treasured bio-products
5
PubMed. Placentophagia in humans and nonhuman mammals: causes and consequences
6
PubMed. Placentophagy’s effects on mood, bonding, and fatigue: A pilot trial, part 2
7
Placenta. Presence and concentration of 17 hormones in human placenta processed for encapsulation and consumption
8
PubMed Central. Placenta – Worth Trying? Human Maternal Placentophagy: Possible Benefit and Potential Risks
9
Nutrition Research. Human placenta processed for encapsulation contains modest concentrations of 14 trace minerals and elements
10
PubMed Central. Impact of tissue processing on microbiological colonization in the context of placentophagy
11
PubMed Central. Placentophagia in Tribal and Modern Societies: Navigating the Thin Line Between Risk and Benefit
12
PubMed. Neonatal Omphalitis After Lotus Birth
13
PubMed. Lotus Birth: A Case Series Report on Umbilical Nonseverance
14
PubMed Central. Placental-Derived Biomaterials and Their Application to Wound Healing: A Review
15
PubMed Central. Placental Membrane Provides Improved Healing Efficacy and Lower Cost Versus a Tissue-Engineered Human Skin in the Treatment of Diabetic Foot Ulcerations
16
PubMed Central. Full-thickness skin wound healing using human placenta-derived extracellular matrix containing bioactive molecules
17
PubMed Central. Evaluating the Impact of a Cream Containing Horse Placental Extract on Eye Corner Wrinkles in Healthy Women: Single-Blind Comparative Study