Nursing Student Takes Photo With Placenta, Gets Expelled

Facebook claims yet another victim: A Kansas nursing student is fighting back after taking a photo of herself with a human placenta and posting it on Facebook—then getting expelled. Doyle Byrnes has filed a complaint in US District Court in Kansas seeking to force Johnson County Community College to reinstate her. According to Byrnes' lawsuit, she, along with three other students, asked her nursing instructor for permission to photograph the placenta, with the intention of posting the image on Facebook. The instructor reportedly responded, "Oh, you girls," but didn't tell them not to do so.

So Byrnes did, uploading an image to Facebook that showed her smiling while leaning over the placenta in a tray; nothing in the photo identified the woman from whom the placenta came. Three hours after posting the photo, the instructor called Byrnes and told her to remove it, but said she was not in trouble. Byrnes and the three others who posed with the placenta were expelled the next day, reports the AP. You "did not exemplify the professional behavior that we expect in the nursing program,” wrote the college's director in a letter. Says Byrnes' lawyer of the four students, "They're not giggly teenagers. They all impress me as serious, career-minded women who are utterly stunned at what's happened to them." (More Facebook stories.)