About a quarter of all pregnancies end in a loss.

What if the placenta holds the key to success?

I think we owe the people that are delivering these babies in answers to why something went wrong.

It's Wednesday, November 1st, but just like every day, today is Science Friday.

I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. Just a heads up, today's episode deals with the sensitive topic of pregnancy loss.

So please take care if you choose to listen. When a miscarriage happens, the parent is often told by

doctors that they don't know what happened and to just try again. Dr. Harvey Clyman is the

director of the Yale School of Medicine's Reproductive and Placental Research Unit. He speaks to guest

host Flora Lickman about his work to better understand the placenta and its relationship

to pregnancy loss. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me here, Flora.

Okay, let's start with the placenta. Tell me more about it. It seems like an amazing organ,

but I want to hear more from you. Sure. I think one thing I want to clarify, people often say the baby is born, and out comes mom's placenta.

The placenta is part of the baby, the fetus, and the embryo.

You can think of the placenta as the root system of the tree.

And just like a tree, a tree cannot survive without its roots. As you said,

at the beginning, it basically supplies everything necessary for survival. In fact, that embryo

and fetus have no other way to survive except through the placenta. So if the placenta isn't

working or stops functioning, then that is disastrous for the embryo

and the fetus.

Wait, so are you saying that the placenta is not the pregnant person's organ?

It's actually the fetus or the embryos organ?

Exactly.

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