It's A Boy! And a Placenta.

From WSJ.com

It isn't just their babies some women expect to bring home after giving birth.

A small but growing group of mothers also want to leave with the placenta, a position that can put them in conflict with hospitals that traditionally treat the afterbirth as medical waste.

Most of the women seek to encapsulate their placentas—which involves drying the organ and putting it into pill form—a niche practice that proponents believe can help postpartum women. Most medical experts say there is no scientific evidence backing the claim.

Emily Ziff gave birth to her first child at NYU Langone Medical Center in January. But the 33-year-old resident of Williamburg, Brooklyn, said she was told the placenta would be sent to a morgue, where she would have to get a licensed funeral director to obtain it for her.

"I think women should be able to keep their placentas if they want to, especially given that the Department of Health seems to have no issue with it," Ms. Ziff said.

"That suggests to me that from a public health standpoint, there isn't an issue there." Ms. Ziff ultimately was able to obtain the services of a funeral director. A doula, or birth coach, subsequently made her placenta into about 100 pills, which she still sometimes takes.

New York state law allows hospitals to release healthy placentas. Some hospitals require patients to sign waivers; others readily release placentas. And others don't have any protocols at all, leading to ranging practices that depend on which doctor or nurse is on staff that day.

While some cultures have a history of burying placentas or consuming them, other women engage in the practice for perceived homeopathic benefits.

Still, most patients will say they are requesting the placenta for cultural or religious reasons because the placenta then won't be classified as biomedical waste under New York state Health Department rules.

Placenta encapsulation is a relatively new practice in Western cultures, particularly on the East Coast, but one that local doulas say is slowly growing in popularity. It is believed to have Chinese origins and generally involves steaming and dehydrating the placenta and grinding it up into a powder that is put into capsules. Some women also get tinctures made. Supporters believe the nutrients, proteins and hormones in the afterbirth help avoid postpartum depression, increase milk production and facilitate overall recovery.

Lisa Fortin, a Williamsburg-based doula, has started a petition on Change.org urging NYU Langone Medical Center to release healthy placentas. The petition has been signed by more than 350 women.

"The wording from New York state definitely stops short from giving moms the right to take their placentas home, and frankly that's something I would like to see changed," Ms. Fortin said. NYU is in the process of reviewing its policy to see if changes can be made "to simplify such requests without endangering public health," Robert Press, chief medical officer and patient safety officer, said in an email.

"Our policy was designed to balance a new mother's desire for her baby's placenta against the risk of transmitting a disease to the public, as a placenta has the same risks associated with medical waste," he said.

A New York Downtown Hospital representative said the hospital is revising all of its maternal child health policies. He said he didn't know the current policy.

The birthing center at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan allows mothers to pick up their placentas in the pathology department after they sign a form.

A spokeswoman for Continuum, the hospital system overseeing Roosevelt, said the hospital is trying to change the policy so mothers can sign the form while in the birthing center.

The issue extends into New Jersey, where there is no law addressing placentas.

Nikole Orlando, who is a postpartum doula based in Springfield, N.J., said she's had many clients who have faced roadblocks. "I've had moms who have been threatened," she said. "In another hospital a woman threatened to call the police, and they finally caved in."

Teran Chartier, a 35-year-old mother in Glen Rock, N.J., said when she was getting ready to deliver at Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, she kept getting conflicting information. Eventually, a couple of days before giving birth in November, she was told she would have to obtain the placenta from a funeral home. "To contact a funeral home, to me it just seemed crazy," she said.

A spokeswoman for Valley Hospital said in a voice mail that the hospital doesn't release placentas. "We consider it just safer for staff and even for families," she said. "We will release them to a funeral home if the family wants to dispose of it in a particular manner. But that's it."

Ms. Orlando said Hackensack University Medical Center Women's Hospital has been particularly difficult for some of her clients.

But Dr. Abdulla Al-Khan, section chief of maternal fetal medicine and surgery, insisted that's not the case. "As long as it doesn't have to be tested and the physician has no problem with that, the patient can do whatever they want with it," he said.

Mr. Al-Khan said he has not heard of requests for encapsulation. "From a scientific perspective I don't think there's any evidence that that has shown to be of any benefit."

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Egyptian Lawmaker Resigns Amid Scandal Over Nose Job

from NYTimees.com

CAIRO — The first political scandal of Egypt’s fledgling electoral democracy erupted on Monday after an Islamist lawmaker was expelled from his ultraconservative party for fabricating a story that he was viciously beaten by masked gunmen.

Doctors said that in fact the bandages on his face covered up plastic surgery on his nose.

The lawmaker, Anwar el-Balkimy, had belonged to the Nour Party, part of the ultraconservative Salafi Islamist movement — Egypt’s religious right — whose members typically condemn plastic surgery as sinful, along with most music and other forms of popular entertainment.

At the private hospital where Mr. Balkimy was treated, doctors spoke out against what they called the brazenness of his lies.

But not before a solemn parade of his fellow lawmakers — including the speaker of the Parliament, Saad el-Katatni of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s more mainstream Islamist movement — had visited Mr. Balkimy in his hospital room to express their sympathies. Also not before his colleagues in the Nour Party had demanded the public questioning of the interior minister for his potential responsibility in the supposed attacks. State media reported that the ministry had sent a letter offering its own condolences.

Vain, self-aggrandizing and hypocritical politicians are, of course, as old as politics, even in Egypt. But for their foibles to blossom into public scandal requires conditions that are still a novelty here and elsewhere in the Arab world: lawmakers who win competitive elections with promises to honor their constituents, informants unafraid of extra-legal retribution from the powerful and a free press eager to expose the circus.

In this case, it took just 40 days since the Parliament was seated.

Nader Bakar, a spokesman for the Nour Party, said that in expelling Mr. Balkimy the party was establishing the principle of accountability, requiring public officials whose wrongdoing interferes with their duties to apologize and bear the responsibility — something he said was common around the world but still new in Egypt.

“We forced him, or more pushed him, to resign from the Parliament, and he kindly agreed,” Mr. Bakar said in an interview. “He signed an official apology to the general public; this is the official position,” he said. “He acknowledged that his story wasn’t true.”

Mr. Balkimy could not be reached for comment.

“We have always known that an individual could stick his nose in the people’s affairs," Al Masry Al Youm, the independent daily newspaper, quoted a blogger as saying. "This is the first time the people stick themselves in an individual’s nose, by which I mean, Balkimy’s.”

Bullfighter’s Return Stuns a Hardened Sport

from The New York Times

MADRID — Five months after surviving a horrifying goring, Juan José Padilla, one of Spain’s leading bullfighters, wears a patch over his left eye and cannot chew any food, even after a series of surgeries to reconstruct part of his face.

But his recovery is startling for a man who was last seen in images shown around the world stumbling out of a bullring, holding his bloodied face and screaming, “I can’t see!” as his shocked fans looked on.

Mr. Padilla will take a further step on Sunday, when he will re-enter the ring in the western town of Olivenza, making a comeback at a speed that has stunned the rest of the bullfighting profession.

“Sunday will feel like a dream come true, after some very hard months, and I’m fully aware that nobody thought I would be back now,” he said.

Last Oct. 7, Mr. Padilla was gored after slipping on the sand of Saragossa’s bullring. The bull’s horn pierced the fighter’s lower jaw and came out through his left eye socket.

Since his hospitalization, Mr. Padilla says he has spent his time between medical visits training hard, adding that he had killed as many as 10 bulls on private farms in preparation for his return.

Still, fighting with an eye patch will be a challenge at this level of bullfighting, making it particularly dangerous for Mr. Padilla whenever the bull brushes past him on his blind left side.

Despite his injuries, Mr. Padilla, 38, said that he had been encouraged by his wife and two children, although he acknowledged that his comeback did create “some divisions” within his family.

“My parents couldn’t understand why I would want to return,” he said.

Mr. Padilla’s decision comes amid an intense debate in Spain over bullfighting, attacked as a barbaric ritual by animal rights activists but defended by its supporters as a central component of Spanish culture.

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What Ever Happened to the Good Old-Fashioned Nervous Breakdown?

from wsj.com

After ending an unhappy marriage and getting laid off twice, Hannah Shapiro last year found herself alone with two small children to support in Miami, far from her family in England. "I was so scared, I was paralyzed," she says. "My heart was racing. I would take the kids to school and get back into bed."

After a week like that, Ms. Shapiro, age 33, says she had a "light bulb" moment. "I thought, 'What the heck am I doing in bed? I can turn this around.' And I did." She put her writing skills to work and set up a communications consulting business. She still gets anxious at times but no longer feels she's on the edge of breaking down. "I just made myself snap out of it," she says.

Fifty years ago, Ms. Shapiro's experience would have been called a "nervous breakdown"—an unscientific term for personal crises ranging from serious mental illness and alcoholism to marital problems and stress.

Today, psychiatry is more precise. A sudden inability to cope with life's demands could be classified as one of dozens of specific mental disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder or major depression. There's no official term for milder forms of "nervous breakdown," though some patients and clinicians wish there was still a name for a temporary state of being overwhelmed by outside forces without an underlying mental illness.

"I hear the term 'nervous breakdown' from a patient at least once a week," says Katherine Muller, a clinical psychologist at the Center for Integrative Psychotherapy in Allentown, Pa. "The term lives on in our culture, maybe because it seems to capture so well what people feel when they are distressed."

"Given the economic mess we're in, a lot of people are coming in saying they think they're on the verge of a nervous breakdown," says David Hellerstein, research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He says it can be challenging to tell immediately if a patient is having an acute episode of mental illness, or a predictable reaction to extreme stress. Symptoms may be similar—including heart palpitations, chest pains, shortness of breath, uncontrollable crying, dizziness, disorientation, exhaustion and a feeling of "going crazy."

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Kathleen Sebelius Decries 'Cynical Attempt To Roll Back Decades Of Progress In Women's Health'

by Sam Stein, politcal reporting for The Huffington Post

WASHINGTON -- Minutes after former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney found himself tripped up over whether or not he supported a bill that would allow employers to deny health care coverage over religious or moral objections, the White House exhibited no such vagueness on the issue.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Wednesday evening sent The Huffington Post the following statement on the Blunt Amendment, which is slated to have a vote in the Senate Thursday.

Earlier this month, the Department of Health & Human Services reported that over 20 million American women in private health insurance plans have already gained access to at least one free preventive service because of the health care law. Without financial barriers like co-pays and deductibles, women are better able to access potentially life-saving services, and cancers are caught earlier, chronic diseases are managed and hospitalizations are prevented.

A proposal being considered in the Senate this week would allow employers that have no religious affiliation to exclude coverage of any health service, no matter how important, in the health plan they offer to their workers. This proposal isn't limited to contraception nor is it limited to any preventive service. Any employer could restrict access to any service they say they object to. This is dangerous and wrong.

The Obama administration believes that decisions about medical care should be made by a woman and her doctor, not a woman and her boss. We encourage the Senate to reject this cynical attempt to roll back decades of progress in women’s health.

The debate over contraception coverage has managed to remain prominent both on the campaign trail and in Washington D.C. And it stands to reason that Democrats aren't too displeased with that being the case.

This is the second time the Obama administration publicly released a statement on the matter. Meanwhile, party officials were giddy over the Romney campaign's quick walk back of an earlier statement in which he seemingly said he opposed the amendment -- not just because he made an abrupt reversal on the topic, but because he has now publicly come out in favor of an amendment that many voters find objectionable.

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