After your baby is born, the placenta detaches from the uterine wall and is delivered through a final round of mild contractions, typically within 30 minutes. From there, it follows one of several paths: your medical team inspects it, and then it’s either disposed of as medical waste, sent to a pathology lab, donated for medical use, or in some cases, taken home by the parent. What happens depends on your birth, your health, and your preferences.
Delivering the Placenta
The placenta’s exit is sometimes called the third stage of labor, and it’s far less intense than what came before. After your baby is out, your uterus continues to contract. These contractions are milder and closer together, and they work to shear the placenta away from the uterine wall. You’ll be asked to push gently one more time, and the placenta slides out through the birth canal. Most people barely remember this part.
In most hospital births, your care team actively manages this stage by giving you a synthetic version of oxytocin shortly after delivery. This speeds up the contractions and reduces the risk of heavy bleeding. Some people opt for a physiological (hands-off) approach, where the body is left to expel the placenta on its own, which can take up to an hour.
Retained placenta, where part or all of the organ stays inside the uterus, happens in about 2 out of every 100 births. If the placenta hasn’t emerged within 30 minutes of active management or 60 minutes of physiological management, your provider will intervene to remove it manually, because tissue left behind can cause serious bleeding or infection.
How the Placenta Is Inspected
Before anything else happens with the placenta, your midwife or doctor examines it carefully. This isn’t a cursory glance. They’re checking that every piece came out, because even a small fragment left inside the uterus can cause problems.
A healthy, full-term placenta is roughly the size of a dinner plate, about 15 to 20 centimeters across and 2 to 2.5 centimeters thick, weighing around 500 to 600 grams (roughly one-sixth of the baby’s birth weight). It has two distinct sides. The maternal side, which was attached to the uterine wall, is dark maroon and divided into 15 to 20 lobe-like sections called cotyledons. These lobes should fit together neatly without gaps, forming a uniform circle. The fetal side, which faced the baby, is shiny and grayish, covered by a translucent membrane.
Your provider lifts the placenta by the umbilical cord to check the membranes for completeness. There should be a single hole where the baby passed through. They inspect the cord itself, confirming it contains the normal three blood vessels: two arteries and one vein. A missing artery can signal kidney problems in the newborn. They also look for abnormalities like extra lobes, areas of dead tissue, blood clots, or calcification on the maternal side. All of this is noted in your medical record.
When the Placenta Goes to the Lab
Most placentas that look normal on visual inspection are disposed of as medical waste. But in certain situations, the placenta is preserved in a container and sent to a pathology lab for microscopic analysis. This happens when the birth or pregnancy raised clinical concerns: pregnancy loss, suspected placental abruption (where the placenta separates too early), fetal growth restriction, preterm birth, preeclampsia with severe features, signs of maternal infection, or cases where the baby shows early signs of neurologic compromise or organ failure. Any placenta that looks abnormal during the bedside exam also gets sent for a full workup.
Pathologists can identify infections, blood flow problems, and inflammatory patterns that explain complications during pregnancy or delivery. The results sometimes change how the newborn is monitored or treated, and they can inform planning for future pregnancies.
Hormonal Shifts After Delivery
The placenta is a hormone-producing organ, and its removal triggers one of the most dramatic hormonal shifts in human biology. Throughout pregnancy, the placenta churns out estrogen and progesterone at levels far beyond anything the body normally produces. The moment it’s delivered, those levels plummet. This drop begins immediately and continues over the following weeks.
To partially compensate, oxytocin surges right after birth. This spike supports uterine contractions (which control bleeding), promotes bonding, and stimulates milk production. But the steep decline in estrogen and progesterone is a major driver of the mood swings, night sweats, and emotional volatility that many people experience in the early postpartum period. It’s not a character flaw or a failure to cope. It’s a predictable biological event set in motion the instant the placenta leaves your body.
Cord Blood Collection
Before or immediately after the placenta is delivered, families who have arranged cord blood banking will have blood collected from the umbilical cord. Cord blood is rich in stem cells that can be used to treat blood cancers, immune disorders, and other serious diseases. Collection happens after the cord is clamped and cut, and it doesn’t affect the baby or the birth.
Current guidelines recommend delaying cord clamping by 30 to 60 seconds after delivery in healthy, full-term babies, which allows extra blood to flow to the newborn. A delay of up to 60 seconds should not significantly reduce the volume or quality of cells available for cord blood donation. Families expecting twins should know that twin placentas tend to be smaller, making it less likely that either cord blood unit will meet the minimum cell volume required for storage.
Donated Placentas in Wound Care
Some hospitals offer the option of donating your placenta for medical use, and the applications are genuinely remarkable. The innermost membrane of the placenta, called the amnion, can be processed into tissue grafts used to treat complex wounds. These amniotic membrane dressings are used on burns, chronic leg ulcers, and surgical wounds that haven’t responded to conventional treatment.
Placental tissue contains natural properties that reduce inflammation, fight infection, and limit scar formation. For patients with wounds that have stalled in the healing process, an amnion graft essentially gives the tissue a biological boost, providing the building blocks the body needs to restart repair. Donated placentas from screened donors are processed rapidly after birth and transformed into these grafts, which are used in wound care clinics and burn centers.
Taking the Placenta Home
Some parents choose to take their placenta home. Reasons vary widely, from cultural and spiritual traditions like burial or planting it beneath a tree, to encapsulation (dehydrating and grinding it into capsules to swallow postpartum). Hospital policies on releasing placentas differ, so if this matters to you, it’s worth asking your birth facility about their process ahead of time.
Placentophagy, the practice of consuming the placenta, has grown in popularity based on claims that it eases postpartum depression, boosts milk supply, and restores energy. No rigorous evidence supports these claims, and there are real safety concerns. The CDC investigated a 2016 case in Oregon where a newborn developed a serious bacterial infection linked to the mother’s consumption of placenta capsules. The encapsulation process does not reliably kill infectious pathogens. The temperatures used in many commercial preparations, around 130°F (54°C), may not be sustained long enough to eliminate dangerous bacteria like Group B Streptococcus. In that case, the contaminated capsules likely increased the mother’s bacterial colonization, which then transferred to the infant.
No regulatory standards exist for processing placenta for consumption. Companies that offer encapsulation services may screen for certain preexisting infections but typically do not account for infections acquired during or after labor. If you’re considering this, the risk of introducing harmful bacteria to yourself or a breastfeeding newborn is the central concern.