I've blogged earlier about markets for breast milk, but here is an article that considers them also in connection with placenta and feces:
The Law of Self-Eating—Milk, Placenta, and Feces Consumption by Mathilde Cohen, Law, Technology and Humans, 3(1), pp.109-122.
"Milk, Placenta, and Feces
"Since antiquity at least, there have been markets in human milk. Until the twentieth century, they relied primarily on wet nurses hired (or forced) to nurse infants directly on the breast.14Ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman pharmacopeias called for human milk as a therapeutic substance to treat burns as well as ailments affecting the ears, eyes, and genitals.15Traditional Chinese medicine employed human milk in a variety of preparations to cure diseases, such as debilitation, arthritis, rheumatism, voicelessness, amenorrhea, eye infections, and poisoning.16
"Today, markets in human milk continue to thrive.17Such markets assume two main forms: 1) informal markets through which people give or sell their milk peer-to-peer via their social circles or online; and 2) formal markets whereby profit or non-profit organizations, such as milk banks and commercial human milk companies, collect, process, and distribute milk to hospitals and a few outpatients for a fee. Human milk is sought after by three main categories of consumers: infants, adults, and researchers.
...
"Placenta
"Human placentas are used for spiritual, nutritional, medical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic purposes. Placentophagy, or the act of eating one’s placenta after childbirth, has been practiced in the Global North since the beginningof the home-and natural-birth movement in the 1970s.22It is not an unprecedented phenomenon. Indeed, historian Jacques Gélis reported that:
"Placentophagy, the custom of eating the newly expelled placenta, has existed at various times amongst people of very different cultures. From the sixteenth century onwards, European travellers to the new world were much struck by this custom, which they unfailingly reported.23
"According to Gélis, placentophagy was also practiced in Europe; however, “doctors and churchmen were more and more repelled, from the end of the seventeenth century onwards, by this custom . . . so ‘repugnant to humanity." In the past decade, placentophagy has reemerged as a mainstream practice in the U.S., where it has been described as “anew American birth ritual.25
"Few randomized controlled trials have corroborated the benefits of placentophagy. However, placenta eaters are motivated by the hope of obtaining nourishment, hastening post-birth recovery, warding off postpartum depression, facilitating lactation, as well as spiritual motives, such as connecting with the baby and the environment. Placentas can be eaten raw or cooked."
...
"Minimally processed placental membranes have significant commercial and medical potential to treat, among other indications, eye diseases and acute and chronic wounds. The for-profit American company MiMedx also “grinds up amniotic tissue from placenta into an injectable product to treat tendinitis, strains, and other ailments.”29Much like human milk,placentas are increasingly seen as reservoirs of stem cells and thus are attractive to the field of regenerative and tissue engineering, and, more recently, as potential sources for treating coronavirus patients."
...
"Feces
"Excrement is typically regarded as disgusting; however, the medical use of human and animal feces has a long record. Heinrichvon Staden notes that:
"Most prominent among the ingredients in the Hippocratic pharmacological ‘dirt’ arsenal is the excrement of various animals. .. . the belief in the therapeutic usefulness of excrement was shared by ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Talmudic, and Indian healers. . . . There is, therefore, abundant evidence that . . . ‘excrement therapy’—was a cross-cultural phenomenon extant already in the ancient world.32
"In Chinese medicine, human feces were used 1,700 years ago as a “suspension by mouth for patients who had food poisoning or severe diarrhea.”33
"Fast forward to the twentieth century, the community of microorganisms that dwell in the human gut has been shown to play a crucial role in human health. Fecal microbiota transplantation (“FMT”) was first identified in the modern scientific literature in 195834and has rapidly grown in popularity since the early 2010s. FMT consists in the delivery of processed stool from a healthy donor into the intestinal tract of a sick person via an enema, colonoscopy, naso-duodenal tube, capsules, or other means. As microbiologist Mark Smith and his colleagues noted, “the goal is to displace pathogenic microbes from the intestine by re-establishing a healthy microbial community.”35FMT has proven strikingly effective in treating Clostridium difficile, a potentially lethal infection that most commonly affects older adults in hospitals or in long-term care facilities, typically after the use of antibiotics."
...
"Despite these differences, milk, placenta, and feces share two sets of core similarities that justify their grouping in this analysis. First, milk, placenta, and feces are tissues that can be severed from the body without harm or risk of harm. Notably, milk and feces are replenishable bodily substances, while the placenta is a transient organ expelled from the body during childbirth. Thus, far from constituting “corpse medicine”42(i.e., medicine that uses human materials obtained from dead bodies), the use of such substances can be characterized as living food or medicine. There are also no adverse health effects associated with the act of donation. Quite the opposite, good health requires that people eject the milk, placenta, and feces they produce from their bodies.
...
"Second, these three products have similar channels of circulation, including via private, domestic consumption, peer-to-peer markets, medical and research institutions, and global markets in foods, drugs, and cosmetics. This wide scope for circulation is possible due to the potential for DIY treatments alongside higher tech uses involving special processing and expertise. Milk, placenta, and feces are collected, processed, and distributed by banks similar to other tissue banks; however, aspiring consumers can also obtain milk, placenta, and feces and use them on their own. Unlike blood transfusion or organ transplantation, no professional expertise or complicated equipment is necessary to achieve basic forms of consumption. Milk, placenta, and fecescan be obtained directly from their producersafter some screening (or not) and consumed as is or minimally processed at home. Conversely, bio-banks systematically screen donors, subjecting them and their samples to a battery of tests, before processing their products in various ways; for example, by freezing, thawing, pooling, enriching, freeze-drying (in the case of milk), irradiating (in the case of placenta), encapsulating (in the case of stool). This is a fast-evolving field.
...
"No uniform perspective has emerged on the legal classification of the various body materials consumed by humans. In this respect, milk, placenta, and feces provide a case in point, as they do not fit neatly within the standard legal classifications for comparable products, such as foods, drugs, tissues, cosmetic ingredients, or waste products. Different countries have adopted contrasting legal regimes—or no regimes at all—to regulate these substances.
...
"In the so-called post-colonial era, the law of self-consumption illustrates the broader phenomenon of a “jurisprudence of disgust,” to use an expression that Alison Young developed to describe the legal censorship of provocative or “obscene” artwork.71A significant dimension of contemporary law making can be characterized as a response to what is considered disgusting around or among us, which reflects an endeavor to confine and tame what repulses us. This is particularly obvious in the context of what legal scholar Kim Krawiec calls “taboo trades” (and economist Alvin Roth dubs “repugnant markets”); that is, the exchanges and transactions of products that are considered culturally immoral and uncaring, such as those involving organs, babies, sex, drugs, and corruption."
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