Sunday, August 28, 2011

Women ingesting placenta after birth

I had heard of this before, but I recently saw a story on CTV about it, where the midwife offering the service of encapsulating women's placentas after they give birth says that other mammals eat their placentas after giving birth, so "it seems like something humans should be doing as well."

The reason that other mammals eat the placenta after giving birth is so that predators that could eat the newborn babies aren't attracted by the smell, not because of any health benefits. Humans don't have to worry about predators trying to eat their babies.

Other things that mammals do include eating the newborns' defecation and drinking their urine and eating any offspring with physical deformities. So of course humans should be doing that too, right?

A woman interviewed in the piece aired on CTV claimed that when she takes her placenta pills, she feels like she has more energy, and produces more breast milk. It's entirely possible that any perceived benefits could be attributed to the placebo effect or a confirmation bias.

In my search to find some scientific data on this subject, all I could find was a study from the 1950s on 210 women. I couldn't find any information more recent than that.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

The "brat" ban

Or as I think it would be more accurately called - the "bad parents" ban.
Society has been putting up with badly behaved kids for far too long. Kids who run around in restaurants, bumping into the servers and making them drop (and sometimes break) things. Kids who run around in stores and bump into people or knock things off the shelves. Kids who just scream while their parents sit there ignoring them, while their screaming brat annoys everyone around them. Why do they do these things? Because their parents don't make them stop doing those things. Because there are no consequences for the kids for doing those things.
Most of the parents of these kids would try to justify it by saying "they're just kids", but it is possible to have well behaved kids. If your kids run around like wild animals, it's because you haven't taught them any different.
(On a related note, my dogs are better behaved than most kids these days).

Interestingly enough, it seems to be the parents who let their kids run around wild who make the most fuss about this ban.

This is not a childfree vs. parents issue. There are a lot of parents who agree with the "brat" ban as well. When they pay for a babysitter so they can go out for a night with the grown-ups, the last thing they want is to hear someone else's kid screaming, crying, or running around and causing trouble, ruining it for everyone else.

Some parents are whining "have some compassion for the children."
How about you have some compassion for the people who are suffering hearing damage due to your kid relentlessly screaming? (A child's screaming can be up to 110 decibels. Anything over 85 decibels can cause hearing damage).

Some parents say things like "how would you have felt as a child if you were excluded from everything?"
Well, as a child, I was excluded from most things my parents did. When my parents went out, my siblings and I stayed home with a babysitter. We rarely went out with my parents. That's the way it was, then (and not all that long ago). We didn't go everywhere with my parents, and we survived. It's not going to kill your kids to not take them everywhere with you. Some places just aren't appropriate for young children.

And before you panic, thinking that pretty soon you won't be able to take your kid out in public anywhere, there are currently only a handful of businesses doing this. Even if it spreads like wildfire and businesses around the world adopt the "brat ban", there will still be places for you to take your kids.

This is a backlash against all of the badly behaved kids whose parents don't discipline them.
If you want someone to blame for this, look in the mirror. Don't blame childfree people and label us as "child haters".