Midwife Buries Placenta and is Suspended

This is just ridiculous! The New York Law Journal reports on a placenta brouhaha. A hospital has suspended the privileges of a midwife who, upon patient request, took home a placenta and buried it in her garden. The hospital believes the placenta is "medical waste" and has suspended the midwife's hospital privileges for over a year now. Jeanette Breen is struggling to get her midwifery privileges reinstated at the hospital, for her clientele has dropped 1/3 due to the hospital's restrictive and unprecedented uproar.

A Baldwin midwife is waging a legal battle for restoration of her privileges at Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow that were suspended after she removed a placenta from the hospital to bury it in her garden.

Jeanette Breen, 60, who has been delivering babies at the medical center since the early 1990s, was suspended on Nov. 9, 2005, shortly after she left the hospital with the placenta.

The patient gave Ms. Breen, who is a registered nurse and a licensed midwife, permission to take the placenta. However, Ms. Breen did not seek prior authorization from the medical center, which claims that she violated the hospital's policy and state law for the disposal of regulated medical wastes.

Many patients of midwives view placentas as natural products of conception that should be given a proper burial instead of being discarded as medical waste. "The baby and the placenta are really part of the mother's body and should be treated with respect, rather than merely discarded as a blood or infectious agent," said Ms. Breen, who has admitted removing placentas from hospitals on several occasions, apparently without attracting attention or concern.

"The medical community looks at birth as a medical event and midwives and, generally, midwives' patients look at birth as a sacred life event and normal physiologic process of the woman's body," she said.

Perhaps the hospital has a contract selling placentas to a pharmaceutical or cosmetic company and was upset at the loss of revenue.

"I have never heard of a hospital overreacting so ridiculously," said the attorney, Susan Jenkins, a former general counsel to the American College of Nurse-Midwives.

Ms. Jenkins said the hospital's behavior was "unfortunate" and that Ms. Breen should have received nothing worse than a reprimand.

"One person's biological waste is another person's sacred item for burial," Ms. Jenkins said.

Every woman has the right to do what she pleases with her placenta, and here is one more reason why to have a homebirth, so as to treat the organ that nurtured ones child for nine months with respect, not as biohazardous waste or a medical experiment.

Comments

[Patricia Couch]

This article filled me with sadness.
Midwifery a norm in the majority of the world, yet it is constantly being attacked in the US.
Removing hospital privilages ofthis New York Midwife shows me how our culture has been so far removed from the Natural Beauty of Birth.
I strongly believe that more health care establishments should display a stronger sensitivity to the many different religous and cultural aspects of the birthing process.
Families should be given a choice regarding the treatment of their placenta, if they so desire. This could be simply dealt with by having the family sign a consent form to remove placenta "biohazardous products of birth" from the hospital.