Breast Milk and Facebook: When Mom's Can't Nurse

A new phenomenon is sweeping across facebook. Mothers, who cannot nurse, are turning to facebook in order to find breastmilk donors. And the government is not happy about it. Now before we delve into the story of moms who are heading to facebook to find donor breastmilk we need to take a short trip back in history.

King Louis XIV had a wet nurse. What is a wet nurse? A wet nurse is a woman who is hired to breast feed an infant. This practice is ancient and crosses various cultures. In certain parts of Africa, women practice co-nursing or cross nursing where various women take part in feeding infants. The saying "It takes a village to raise a child" couldn't be more apt in cultures like this. The practice of having a wet nurse depended on the situation of the mother at the time. If the child was illegitimate, it was possibly passed off to a wet nurse. If a mother had an illness, the infant could be passed to a wet nurse. If a woman was of an upper class in society, she would pass off her infant to a wet nurse with the hopes of becoming pregnant again quicker.

Fast forward to todays world; cross-nursing, co-nursing and feeding infants donated breastmilk is still going on. Saylma Hayek, in February of 2009, caused a bit of an uproar in the media when she was video taped breast feeding an infant in Africa whose mothers milk had dried up. The child was in danger of starving and the actress took matters into her own hands.

Breastmilk is becoming a more 'in demand' product since the American Academy of Pediatrics, LaLeche League and others have told us that breastmilk is the best. Most of these organizations steer new mothers away from formula, citing the awfulness of the processed product while spouting the health benefits of breastmilk (which are many!). This puts mothers who cannot or who are unable to breastfeed in a tight spot.

This has led some mothers to facebook where they could find the best food (breastmilk) for their nursing infants. According to NPR in a report on "Moms Who Can't Nurse Find Milk Donors Online", told the story of one womans quest to find breastmilk for her baby and that led to finding many other moms who were willing to be a part of milk sharing. Lisa Ward's story leads to the facebook group Eats on Feets where she found women willing to donate breastmilk to her for free, she would just have to pick up the milk or meet the donor somewhere for it.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Food and Drug Administration are not happy with groups like Eats on Feets saying that there is a health risk involved with this type of milk-sharing including the possibilities of HIV, hepatitis B and other infections. Both of these agencies recommend going to one of the 11 breast milk banks in the country if you cannot breast feed but want your child to have breast milk.

The problem with this is as Ward pointed out in the NPR story after contacting the breast milk bank in her area, "They said I'd need a prescription. And it'd be $3.50 per ounce. And I saw that, and my jaw dropped. And I was like, 'There's no way we could afford that.'" It should be pointed out too that breast milk that has been donated to breast milk banks is screened, tested and also pasteurized before becoming available to other mothers.

Mothers who use Eats on Feets or any of the other 110 facebook groups are responsible for finding out the health of the breastmilk donor before taking and using the breast milk. A trip to the discussion boards shows that moms do take safety seriously and that no mother wants to be responsible for another womans baby becoming sick from her breast milk.