Queer as Moms
Meri Perra blogs about the challenges she and her partner face in trying to raise their girls with feminist values
Motivated by a Toronto Star article featuring my former prenatal class teacher, Rean Cross, I decided it was high time to do something about the two-year old placenta at the back of our freezer. Ideally, before it became old enough to get a driver’s license and leave on its own.
After writing about my aged placenta last week, it turns out I am not the only one with human organ meat in the kitchen. This post may motivate the clean out of the back corners of freezers in a lot of homes. I first meet Cross when she was teaching a totally comfortable and super-informative queer positive prenatal class in Toronto. (Since then, Cross has handed the class over to someone else.) She is a practicing doula, childbirth educator and a self-described placenta lady. Read more...
Queer as Moms
Meri Perra blogs about the challenges she and her partner face in trying to raise their girls with feminist values
When you give birth at home, disposing of the placenta, just like the rest of the clean up, is your responsibility. You can’t say to the midwives, “No, no thank you. You take it.” We’ve tried.
That’s how we learned that in Toronto, placentas go in the green bin. Easy-peasy: your midwife simply wraps that placenta up in many plastic bags, and gives it to you. A slightly gross bundle of blood along with your bundle of joy.
After our first child, my partner discreetly tossed the disguised organ in the bin on pick up day. We didn’t think twice. Operation get rid of birth waste completed.
When our dear Lileith came almost two years ago, it wasn’t quite that simple. Toronto city workers were on strike. There was no green bin pick up. Read more...
