The other red meat.

The DAMMIT JANET! gals do like a good guffaw. Nothing better and healthier to shake off the toxic miasma that rises from the loathsome and malevolent posts found at Blob Blogging Wingnut and SoWrongOrNuts.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blogpost at Birth Pangs about the placenta, a ... um, what the hell is it? ... Okay, I have just received irrefutable confirmation that the placenta is indeed an organ. (Thank gawd my daughter's number is on speed-dial. Family connections are better than the internet for many things including obscure medical information.)

The subtext of that tongue-in-cheek blogpost addressed a serious issue: the never-ending obsession that pro-lies fundamentalist religious abortion-criminalizers have for The Fetus©™.

Imagine my surprise (as well as my unbridled giggles) when I found this essay at Time. Joel Stein is a true mensch.

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta. But there are two things you don't argue about with a pregnant woman: what she eats and that being full of life indeed looks sexy. So when Cassandra told me that for $275, a woman would come to our house, cook Cassandra's placenta, freeze-dry it and turn it into capsules to help ward off postpartum depression and increase milk supply, I said, "$275 is a bargain compared with the $20,000 I'll have to spend to tear out our kitchen immediately afterward." ...

When the placenta did come out, Cassandra, dazed from 21 hours of labor, somehow made sure the nurses delivered it to us in a flat plastic container, which I put into an ice-filled Monsters vs Aliens cooler I brought. When I asked if I could keep the placenta overnight in the refrigerator out in the hall, the nurses looked at me like I was crazy. When you gross out people who work at a hospital, you have accomplished something.

In a fog, I drove the placenta home, where I wrapped the container in a bag and wrapped that bag in a bag and wrapped that bag in every remaining bag we had in the house.

Read the whole thing. There's an astonishing (and some would say, disturbing) video, too!

Thanks, JJ - you gave me a title for this post.