Facebook Oversharing Gets Placental

We all have annoying friends who post TMI-ish pictures of their own frozen placentas or their infants’ detached navels, but four Kansas nursing students have decided to up the Facebook oversharing ante… by posting pictures of someone else’s placenta.

The Effluvium Four have been kicked out of nursing school for the infraction, and one of the affected students, Doyle Byrnes, is pursuing legal action to force the school to reinstate her before classes start on January 19th.

The infraction allegedly occurred at an off site lab, when they asked permission to photograph the placenta. The supervising nurse didn’t tell them that they couldn’t take a picture, instead shaking her head and saying “Oh, you girls.” She never told the girls that photographing the placenta was not allowed, nor that they would be disciplined for doing so. According to NBC,

Afterward, at least one of the students, Byrnes, posted a photo on the social networking site showing her smiling broadly, wearing a lab coat and surgical gloves and leaning over the placenta in a tray. There was nothing in the photos to identify the placenta as coming from a particular woman.

The photo remained on Facebook for about three hours until the nursing instructor called her that evening and told her to remove it. Byrnes asked if she was in trouble and the instructor replied she was not, the lawsuit says. Byrnes removed the photo immediately and has since closed her Facebook account.

Do-not-want-ness of bloddy photos on a social network aside, should the girls have been kicked out of school for posting the placental pic onto a social networking site? Placentas aren’t recognizable or traceable to particular individuals by the public at large, but is it ever ethical to photograph and share pictures of human body parts? What other body parts or excretions could she have been kicked out for posting on Facebook? And if nursing students in Kansas are getting expelled for photographing placentas and posting them on the internet, then why the hell haven’t those horny doctors on Grey’s Anatomy lost their licenses for all of that surgical fucking they’ve been doing?