Something weird happens to people when they find out they’re having a baby. They do things that they – rational, sensible, grown-up people, people who have kitchen islands and know exactly which day is right for recycling – never saw themselves doing.
Suddenly, they find themselves paying hundreds of pounds to go to NCT classes to make friends with other pregnant people. They attend sessions at the local hospital where they learn how to handle a giant, woolly womb. They listen to hypnobirthing tapes and talk about “breathing the baby out” or wanting to “give birth without pain relief”. They even go to gong baths.
Then, there are slips into the truly weird – like men who take a shot of their partner’s “natural sweet vanilla milk” (I’m looking at you, Joe Wicks), or Calvin Harris, who caused a bit of a stir this week with his... unorthodox approach to the arrival of his baby boy, Micah, after a home birth in Ibiza.
In a photo deemed even too graphic for Instagram (the shot has been slapped with an age restriction by the social media site), the Scottish DJ – who is married to BBC Radio 1 presenter and broadcaster Vick Hope – proudly shows off his wife’s placenta and the umbilical cord, positioned in a heart shape. And trust me, you do not want to look at that while eating your breakfast.
The other images, in perfect sequence, appear to show the organ being dehydrated in some kind of air fryer contraption and turned into tasty placenta pills.
Harris captioned the unusual photo montage with: “My wife is a superhero and I am in complete awe of her primal wisdom!” To which many have been asking: where was Harris’s “primal wisdom” when posting those shots?
Some fans blasted the warts-and-all snapshots as “unnecessary”, while others said simply: “Placenta pic was not needed bro.” And one commenter wrote: “Placenta pic is exactly what I needed to remind me to stay single and childless for a few more years.” Snarf.
Now, I’m not opposed to lifting the lid on the gory, scary, visceral reality of childbirth – personally, I think it’s pretty cool (and important) to show exactly what women go through to bring babies into the world.
I find myself eye-rolling when I see images of the royal family, for example, looking pristine on the steps of a posh private hospital after giving birth when I know – we all know – that behind the door of the delivery suite is absolute carnage.
There’s a lot going on when you give birth, to say the least. There are screams and sweat and tears and swearing and third-degree tears and stitches afterwards and savage, feral declarations that you hate the person who did this to you, that you wish you’d never decided to get pregnant in the first place, that you will never, ever do it again – until you do. There’s even mesh underwear.
Even those who have elective C-sections don’t get away scot-free. There is blood and gore and latex gloves covered in all sorts of fluids; there is fainting and pain from epidurals and (according to friends who have had them) a sensation of “being pulled apart”.
And among the “natural birthers” who are lucky enough to labour in water, there are sieves handed to husbands and partners to – how shall I put this delicately? – fish out any floaters from the birthing pool.
After I gave birth, the placenta dropped out on the floor beneath me and wobbled there, looking menacing – and not a little like a Portuguese man o’war. The only difference between me and Harris is that I didn’t take a picture and post it – but after seeing it, believe me there’s no way on earth I would have wanted to eat it, even in pill form.
Still, I get it. I get the temptation to consume your child, I really do. It’s a strange and powerful, atavistic sensation – it’s the strange feeling we get when we are in love; when we want to (almost literally) bite or nibble or eat the thing we adore: lovers, children, pets. There’s even a term for it: “cute aggression”.
So, it doesn’t entirely surprise me that Harris loves his wife and child so much that he wants to devour every single part of them. If you squint (and scroll past the gory shot), it seems quite sweet. Plus, I know for a fact that you’re borderline insane after you’ve brought a child into this world: I buried the stump of my daughter’s umbilical cord beneath a rose bush in the garden – at the full moon.
I didn’t eat her placenta, though. I did not do that.
So, why do some do it at all – and do they regret it? Hilary Duff has confessed that she still feels “repulsed” by the fact that she drank her placenta in a smoothie, shortly after giving birth to her daughter, Banks. “I saw that thing, it looked gnar,” she said on Whitney Cummings’ podcast Good For You, in 2020.
She said that she did it on the guidance of her midwives – and that her sister did the exact same thing (only in pill form, rather than blended with strawberries, berries and bananas).
“They say that it stops your body from haemorrhaging after you have a baby,” Duff said. “They say that it gives you all kinds of energy and nutrients and [it] helps balance your hormones and stuff like that.”
She then added: “And I’m still completely repulsed by it.”
Some people – including Harris, presumably – believe that eating the placenta can help prevent postnatal depression (PND) and improve milk supply, or provide important nutrients like iron; whereas others point out that its entire purpose is to filter out waste away from the baby.
Crucially, there is no actual scientific evidence that eating the placenta has any health benefits. One top gynaecologist went as far as to say that it “borders on cannibalism”.
Like I said, we are all a bit insane after having a baby. Some of us, clearly, more than others.
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