Is it typical for the doctor to send the placenta to Pathology after a baby is born in the hospital?
Asked by
jca (
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August 6th, 2011
When my daughter was born four years ago. The water broke on a Tuesday and she came out almost 48 hours later. It was not two days of active labor, but it is a long time between the water breaking and the baby coming out.
After she was born, the doctor took the placenta and told the nurse to send it to Pathology. I was wondering if he wanted it to be tested for drugs or something, since it was a long time to be in labor. I didn’t ask him because it was late at that point and I was tired, and he was kind of cranky (because I gave him a hard time LOL).
Is it typical for the doctor to send the placenta to Pathology?
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7 Answers
I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s a lot of stuff that is often left over after surgery (arms and legs for example) that you can’t really just send to landfill and have to be disposed of more carefully. The hospital I work in you send it to the mortuary for disposal but path lab is a reasonable place to arrange for correct disposal.
I think it could be standard procedure, yes.
We use placenta (among other bits) to train our dogs to find human remains. The docs have the moms sign off on this use and we get the whole thing (no evidence of path lab cutting into them). I agree with @Lightlyseared the path lab has appropriate means of disposal and it doesn’t imply concern that the doc suspects any given pathology.
I’ve never heard of this before. I have heard of people freezing them in case they ever need the stem cells or whatever cells they have in future to help them combat cancer.
I would think they would send it to pathology only if they thought something was wrong or could be wrong. Like evidence of some cancer or other condition. It costs money to send things to pathology. It can’t be standard procedure. The insurers wouldn’t stand for it, I don’t think.
I work in the NICU – it is not terribly uncommon for me to run across placental pathology reports, but the NICU is a small subsample of all delivering moms. It’s probably not 100% standard, but they likely have a long checklist of things that are worthy of pathological examination.
normal procedure for long labors, or when there are complications with the birth,
Most are sent to the morgue for disposal, but pathology is an alternative
I know mine was sent to pathology after I had my youngest son because of the complications that arose at the end of my pregnancy. I don’t remember if they did the same thing when I had my older son as well. I think it’s pretty common to have it sent to pathology these days just to be sure everything was okay with it.
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