A 27-year-old mother who left a placenta, umbilical cord and forceps in a Mississauga park for “holistic purposes” said a police investigation into the matter was “the biggest misunderstanding.”
Natasha Das Gupta told CP24 she left the afterbirth items at Sugar Maple Woods Park, located in the area of Duncairn and Glen Erin drives, one year after she had her daughter Indika inside her home.
“I wanted to do something really natural with it,” she said. “I didn’t just want to throw it in the garbage and the compost bin was not really a better choice. I wanted to do something really beautiful and serene and just put something natural back in nature.”
“I had a home birth and it was a very beautiful calm, natural experience and there’s a lot of regrounding into who we really are when we go through such a big initiation like a natural birth and things just start coming back to you that feel right and make sense and for me it (placing the afterbirth items in the park) was really something that felt right and made sense as a way to end that chapter.”
Das Gupta said she brought the items, which were given to her from her midwife after her birth, with her in a plastic container when she moved from Brantford to Mississauga. At her old home she had the items stored in a deep freezer, but since she has less space at her new home she was keeping the container inside her kitchen freezer.
After contemplating what to do with the afterbirth items, Das Gupta decided on Friday evening to put them in a secluded area of the park where she once saw a coyote roaming around.
“Some people, right after they give birth, encapsulate it (the placenta) after drying it and they consume it, some people cook it, some people eat it raw, a lot of women try to find a way to get nutrients back from their placenta and in my case, because I had it frozen for a year, I’m guessing it wasn’t at its most beneficial point and so that’s a good time to bury it and put it back to the earth because the earth does get a lot of nutrients from something that is so nutrient-dense,” she said.
Officers with Peel Regional Police were then called to the park at around 3:50 p.m. on Monday for a “suspicious incident.”
Investigators said a man, who walking his dog at the time, came across “evidence of childbirth” in the area.
The discovery prompted a search for the mother and her baby as police said they feared the pair may have been in distress, requiring medical attention.
Das Gupta said she contacted police after her mother called her saying “your placenta is all over the news.”
“This is a scary thing for some people to come across and I’m the only person who doesn’t have that perspective because I actually know what happened and so I ended up calling the police and I said ‘hey I have some information about that placenta that you found in the forest’ and they said ‘OK what is it?’ and I said ‘it’s mine.’”
“This is nothing bad. This is nothing dangerous,” Das Gupta told CP24. “No woman gave birth in the night in the dark in a forest alone – that didn’t happen. I was just so touched that people were even worried about me.”
Das Gupta said police did have a thorough conversation with her after she came forward. She said she provided a DNA sample to verify the items belonged to her.
