Image courtesy inhabitots.com

If your mom only hoards your baby teeth—and in my case, your bite-marked plastic Cookie Monster sippy cup, your crusty first soccer socks and your dismembered and sharpie tattooed Barbies–consider yourself lucky.

Parents will soon get to save the placenta their kid snuggled in before she was born.

Yes, her placenta. Far more special than some tattered blankie.

At least Alex Green thought so, when he created the world’s first placenta teddy bear kit for new moms and pops. Unveiled at Doing it for the Kids, a recent exhibition hosted by [re]design that showcased new sustainable toys, the kit “celebrates the unity of the infant, the mother and the placenta.”

Green’s ‘Twin Teddy Kit’ allows new moms an pops to fashion their dried out, tannin and egg yolk-treated placenta into a faceless, pee-yellow colored critter held together by thick black stitches.

In her finished form, Placenta Bear could scare the shit out of Frankenstein.

Still, I don’t know whether to squirm, or do a happy dance for a toy that might honor something that comes out of a woman’s body—instead of dismissing it as just plain nasty.

Western society sticks an ugly stigma on other feminine fluids, most notably menstrual blood. Menses are a woman’s “monthly curse,” a secretion that ladies ought discreetly and cautiously downplay.

Mainstream media and feminine hygiene companies chime in to suggest ladies hide  their monthly periods all together, so, in the words of a Tampax advertisement, women “can feel safe.”

I’m not sure exactly what makes Tampax tremble with fear at the thought of a biological cycle billions of people’s bodies engage in every month, but perhaps it’s the same thing that makes Placenta Bear so terrifying.

So before we condemn it as the most repulsive toy idea since Gak, I hope we  ponder the larger social norms and pop culture influences that may have predisposed us wrinkle our noses at placenta.

I don’t really want one. But these Teddies might help normalize placenta in common discourse and elevate this temporary organ that links a mother and her fetus in the womb to something more appreciated than “the crap that comes out after the baby.”

And even if it doesn’t radicalize the way we frame placenta, for least a few keepsake-crazed mothers like mine, a Placenta Bear might hold invaluable meaning.