How to Make a Placenta Print

When your placenta has finished the work of nourishing and protecting a baby, this multi-talented organ can also make some lovely art! Placenta prints make a wonderful keepsake for the baby book, or you can frame it and have fun watching your friends wonder just how that pretty tree-like art was made. This is a really nice project to do with a friend/doula/midwife in the first couple of days after birth, and is a natural opportunity to reflect on your birth experience. Try not to wait more than about three days, though -- print quality will suffer as the placenta starts to deteriorate.

What you'll need:

• Any decent acid-free art paper will do. Watercolor paper can be especially nice.
• Ink -- acid-free stamp pads are perfect for this kind of project. Buy several colors; some will "take" or look better than others. Green and purple are my personal favorites.
• A fresh placenta, obviously. Ask your midwife to wrap it up and put it in the fridge after the birth.
• Latex gloves (optional). Otherwise, towels to wipe those messy hands!

Step One: Lay the placenta out on a flat surface (cord-side up) and cover it with ink:


Step Two: Press your paper down on top of the inky placenta:


Step Three: Carefully pull up your paper and admire your pretty work!


Tips & Tricks for placenta print success:

• For your first print, try using the blood that's already on the placenta (below, left).
• If your paper is big enough, you don't have to limit yourself to just one print per page. In fact, you can do one print from the maternal side, and one from the fetal side.
• And if you're artsy, consider putting down a background color first, as seen below, right.
• Expect to make at least a dozen prints to get one that you love.
  

On a quest for birthy clip art?

I suggest not starting with Microsoft. When you search "birth" on the Office clip art page, what do you think are the first 3 images that come up?


The first two are of baby Jesus in his manger. And the third?

All hail the almighty bottle, which still reigns supreme as the ultimate iconic image of all things baby.


Let it be clear that I was not expecting photos of a baby crowning, or a really groovy cartoon placenta. But a bottle? What does that have to do with giving birth, really? The bottle imagery that is so pervasive in this cultures flies in the face of everything the AAP, WHO, and UNICEF attempt to promote about breastfeeding. Here are selected quotes from each organization:


"Human milk is uniquely superior for infant feeding and is species-specific; all substitute feeding options differ markedly from it. The breastfed infant is the reference or normative model against which all alternative feeding methods must be measured with regard to growth, health, development, and all other short- and long-term outcomes."


"Breastfeeding is the ideal way of providing young infants with the nutrients they need for healthy growth and development. Virtually all mothers can breastfeed, provided they have accurate information, and the support of their family and the health care system...recommended by WHO as the perfect food for the newborn, and feeding should be initiated within the first hour after birth."


"The aim is to create an environment globally that empowers women to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months and continue to breastfeed for two years or more. This is optimal infant and young child feeding."


[emphasis mine]


It appears that the birth of a baby and the bottle should not ideally be so mixed up with each other. You can't blame Microsoft...the bottles are everywhere. On baby jammies, on nurse's scrubs, on baby cards, gift bags, decorations, children's books and everywhere in between. Both of my daughters barely even knew how to drink from a bottle as infants, and yet, they both look for bottles when it's time to feed their baby dolls. In our culture baby=bottle, despite all of the world's major health organizations striving to push breastfeeding rates higher over the years.


For Mothering magazine's take on why we need a breastfeeding culture, check out the July/August 2006 issue for a great article and discussion. Here is just a taste.


In the meantime, I propose some new clip art that makes sense.