I overheard a conversation today. I was sitting in the sweet little Le Marche St. George with my sweet little friend Le Jessa when two mothers came in. One had a babe in arms and the other had two kids under five.
"She had an undersupply issue," said one.
"Yeah, so that's what I'm saying. She just went to the milk bank." Said the other.
"I heard it's so expensive."
Nobody ever seems to like it when I butt in on their conversations so I just kept my questions -- and my excitement -- to myself (and Jessa). The thing is, I'd forgotten all about this little stream of alterna-parenting: not-for-profit human breast milk cooperatives.
It's no secret that many women in the West (15% of women who breastfeed) as well as a small percentage worldwide (less than 5%, more on this later) have difficulties producing enough milk for their babies. Any breastfeeding difficulty can be physically trying; this particular one has an intense emotional impact. Sarah, my co-blogger, wrote about some of these challenges (and her success!) in this post.
So what happens if you want to have an EBF (Exclusively Breast Fed) baby but your milk supply doesn't seem to be high enough? At first, mama and baby work on the problem themselves with more frequent nursing and maybe a Lactation Consultant's suggestions. But if baby isn't gaining weight or soiling enough diapers, it's time to supplement. Most mamas supplement with formula. Some are happy with this. But many aren't. Isn't there an alternative?
There are mamas with the opposite problem: oversupply. That was me for the first six months of Sweet Baby James' life. Milk, milk everywhere, and not a drop to drink (thirsty?...). Compared to undersupply it's a blessing. But it wasn't fun. I went through four pairs of the best (and most expensive) nursing pads every day. I shoved clean cloth diapers in my bra at night and soaked through them. I actually broke into tears one morning when I realized that no matter what I did, I was going to wake up with my pajamas plastered to my skin with sticky, smelly milk -- and I'd worn my last clean pajama top three nights ago.
The worst part was the run-off. I poured dozens of bottles of expressed milk down the drain and every time I did I felt a twinge of guilt: here I have so much while some have so little. I guess you could say I was the 1% of milk producers.
Thinking there must be some better way, I looked into donating to a milk bank. There are only a handful in the world. There is one in Canada -- it's in BC and if you want to donate you have to pay $ to ship your milk there. Glad to see we have a bank but I'm not in a position to pay to be generous these days.
There's also the International Breast Milk Project which pays for all shipping and has set up a free milk bank for orphaned babies in South Africa... Only problem is, they have also "partnered" with Prolacta Bioscience, a for-profit corporation that charges American parents big bucks to provide their premie babies with breast milk -- the same breast milk that has been donated by American women. Only 25% (10% if the amount received exceeds 400,000 oz.) of the milk donated actually gets to the bank in South Africa. The rest is sold for profit within America.
Prolacta 'invests' $1 per ounce they sell within America in humanitarian aid projects in South Africa. The fact that they can donate that much just shows just how valuable breast milk really is. Feeding a baby on milk bank milk costs about $100/day (EBF babies take in an average of 25 ounces/day). Way to be generous with the proceeds from sales of a material you acquired for free with sanctimonious preachings about helping the needy, Prolacta BioSCAMience.
So I did nothing, and bags of milk I had conscientiously stored in the freezer got chucked in the garbage when we moved. I'd done my research, but not very well. Because tonight I found this site, Milk Share, which hooks up donor and recipient families. Not a milk bank, not a big corporation (you can tell from Milk Share's ugly website -- Prolacta's is way sexier), though recipient families have to pay $20 to sign up. Just a little 'missed connections' messaging board for the lactationally yearning.
In fact, I could make some pretty good cash selling milk within the US through sites like this one, Only the Breast. I'll wait for my Green Card to come through first. But since it's only the state of California (where Prolacta is based...) that consumer-to-consumer sale is outright prohibited, we'd better move to New Jersey. You know, where they're more into this kind of thing.
The ickiness factor, however, kind of ramps up when I think of being paid for my milk. It's not that I'm against being paid for a product of my body (I worked damn hard in a lot of crappy jobs in my day -- what else is elbow grease but a bodily fluid?) but I'm a bit put off by the buyers. 48 of the 204 'Milk Wanted' ads on Only the Breast were posted by people who admit to being men.
Not that men can't be looking to buy breast milk for their babies. You just have to admit it's kind of unlikely. Take this guy whose ad claims a "low vitamin D level" for which he's willing to travel up to 75 miles to get FRESH breast milk. He says he found his vitamin D levels rose while "helping my wife with producing enough milk to feed our child" and he'd like to, you know, uh, get those levels up again.
HINT: Breast milk doesn't contain Vitamin D, that's why we Canadians have to give our babies Vitamin D drops.
HINT: People who do this don't have "a child," they have "a baby".
HINT: If you're a mom working on your milk supply, you're probably pumping a lot and letting the baby comfort nurse a lot, and not generally offering up your mammaries like an extra-handy Gatorade bottle to your thirsty, needs-to-get-out-in-the-sun-more husband.
Ladies, if you want to deal with mail-order fetishists, just sell your panties on Craigslist and be done with it. You'll benefit from a higher profit margin. And there's no need to refrigerate.
Like everything to do with bodies in our society, the issue is complicated. The ethics of buying, selling, and donating are complicated. The logistics are complicated. But it's great that breast milk is becoming more available to mamas who need it. Supplementing with formula doesn't work for everybody -- all babies have a (minor) dairy allergy, and some have a severe one; some babies are allergic to soy. They've gotta eat something. But keeping the digestive tract clear of everything but breast milk for the first six months is supposed to help the villi in the stomach lining to develop.
If you're comfortable with it, breast is best. Even if it's somebody else's.
Code Milk! How I was over-prepared for breastfeeding
Last Tuesday night found Sweet Baby James and I sitting on the living room floor of a very nice apartment in the foggiest part of town. The room was crawling with babies, lactating women, and their relatives. Our first ever La Leche League meeting!
The La Leche League (LLL) is amazing. It was started in 1956 by a bunch of friends who were not convinced by their doctors' opinion that breastfeeding was bad for their babies. Only 20% of American babies were being breastfed at that time, and it was considered so uncouth to discuss nursing in public that they had to call themselves 'The Milk' League in Spanish. Code milk!
LLL was renegade, radical and revolutionary in its time; now it's a soft, welcoming place for people who want to learn more about breastfeeding. They have a book, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, a magazine, a website, and groups meeting weekly in 68 countries.
In the Western world's reckless rejection of lactation in the 1930s-1970s (a squeamishness that accompanied the medicalization of birth and the rise of corporate interest in infant formula), an entire generation was raised without the nipple. While a woman could once turn to her own mama for support and knowledge about breastfeeding, that's not possible if she didn't breastfeed her babies and wasn't breastfed herself. So going to a LLL meeting is a bit like reaching back through the centuries to find a bit of knowledge that you kind of knew already.
Yes, I paid $25 for a one-year membership to a club where I listen to people tell me things I already know. It's strange but wonderful, sitting in a room full of the squeals of children and squalls of babies and feeling, "Oh yeah, I knew that" about something that, frankly, I didn't.
Like biting.
I had been being bitten by Sweet Baby James on a semi-regular basis for the past few weeks. His teeth came in all of a sudden (six teeth over the course of two weeks, both top and bottom in the front. wowza!) and it's as if he didn't quite know what to do with them. And so, as always, he did whatever he liked. Unfortunately for me, whatever he liked included something very sharp and something very sensitive. Ouch.
So I asked about this at the meeting. The leader, as she is directed to do, reflected the question back to the larger group -- had anyone else experienced this? There was one Lactation Consultant-looking woman there (yes, there's an LC look. It involves being well-groomed, doing yoga and wearing handcrafted silver jewelry -- you know who you are) who suggested I de-latch the baby as soon as my milk had stopped flowing, since biting happens when the nipple is further forward in the mouth than when he's really gulping milk down.
Someone else suggested raising the angle of the baby's head, since they most comfortably latch when they're looking upward; and another lady commiserated, saying that she is doing extended breastfeeding with her daughter and not to worry, he would soon grow out of it.
That middle suggestion -- that the angle of the latch might be causing him to bite -- was actually new to me. But as they described it, I really felt like it wasn't. I felt like it was something I had known and forgotten, or maybe could have figured out on my own. A feeling not unlike the one you get from assembling a piece of IKEA furniture without the directions, only to find them hidden under your (also IKEA) couch.
There's much ado these days about how 'not instinctive' breastfeeding is -- the LLL magazine New Beginnings is full of stories from new moms who had terrible difficulties establishing the "breastfeeding relationship" after their baby was born. Thalia says,
Diane says,
But this non-instinctive stuff seems *ahem* counter-intuitive to me. How could we possibly survive as a species if the womanly art of breastfeeding wasn't hard-wired? And how come, given that I'm not a 100% insufferable jerk, do I feel like I 'know' this stuff already? Anthropologist Meredith Small asks the same question in her excellent book Our Babies, Ourselves: How biology and culture shape the way we parent.
She tells the story of a captive gorilla (Small doesn't say, but I'm assuming she was raised in isolation). This lady gorilla was able to carry and birth her cute little gorilla babies, but they kept getting taken away from her because she didn't know how to nurse them. She had the idea to connect her nipple with something on the baby's head -- but she didn't know that she needed to turn it around to face her. So the keepers got a bunch of human mothers to nurse their babies in front of her. She watched. She learned. She was able to feed her next baby!
So there is a strong learned aspect to breastfeeding. And perhaps this is the essence of intuition -- it's a combination of instinct and learning. It's important that we have good prenatal and prelactation classes available. But maybe, in our drive to be the master of everything in our domain, it's possible to be over-prepared, too. Might we, in our drive for self-education, run the risk of extinguishing the instinctual aspect of the nursing process?
I paid attention in the lactation section of our prenatal class at Montréal's (incredibleamazingawesome, cannotrecommenditenough) Côte de Neiges Maison de Naissance. I knew I wanted to breastfeed my baby and I knew it wasn't going to be easy. The videos showed us how we should hold (but not assault) the baby's head, how we should slightly compress our breast/nipple into the "hamburger shape" (hungry?), and how to tickle the baby's chin or cheek so that he would open up wide and I could shove that nipple in as far as it would go.
And when the baby came, I did all this. My nipples were sore, and there was a blood blister on one. I used a lot of Lanolin (a nice word for sheep grease) and cursing... I did everything they had told me to do -- but he didn't seem to be born with the open-up-wide-so-you-can-shove-your-nipple-in reflex.
I'd tickle his cheek or his chin and he'd open up a little bit, but not as much as he would at other times; or he wouldn't open up at all, preferring instead to suck heavily on his own hands, despite the fact that he was wailing with hunger only a moment before. I had a hectic, heavy letdown reflex (which is when the milk sprays out of the nipple like a sprinkler -- or Niagara Falls, as the case may be) so I'd be sitting there getting madder than a wet hen as the baby's fresh onesie got drenched, too.
And I was in pain. That blood blister developed into two. One of the tough things about starting to nurse is that you still have to continue to nurse on both breasts, even if one of them has a damaged nipple. Sometimes I would end up making it worse, since because it hurt like hell whether I was getting a good latch or not. I had no way to tell if I was on the right track!
One day, I just gave up. Not nursing, but trying. I gave up trying.
Baby was at my nipple, we were doing our usual three-round latchfight, and I just let him win. I didn't touch him or my breast. I watched. He didn't open his mouth wide like the babies in the video, but he sucked the nipple deep into his mouth, closed his eyes and gulped away. A perfect latch.
This was just my experience. But I hope that as we start to accept breastfeeding as an important aspect of childhood and maternal health, we can relax a little and give the formulaic nursing methods a break. I'm glad that I attended prenatal classes, but a class could never really prepare me for my baby knowing more than I do.
--------------------------
In this post:
The La Leche League (LLL) is amazing. It was started in 1956 by a bunch of friends who were not convinced by their doctors' opinion that breastfeeding was bad for their babies. Only 20% of American babies were being breastfed at that time, and it was considered so uncouth to discuss nursing in public that they had to call themselves 'The Milk' League in Spanish. Code milk!
LLL was renegade, radical and revolutionary in its time; now it's a soft, welcoming place for people who want to learn more about breastfeeding. They have a book, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, a magazine, a website, and groups meeting weekly in 68 countries.
In the Western world's reckless rejection of lactation in the 1930s-1970s (a squeamishness that accompanied the medicalization of birth and the rise of corporate interest in infant formula), an entire generation was raised without the nipple. While a woman could once turn to her own mama for support and knowledge about breastfeeding, that's not possible if she didn't breastfeed her babies and wasn't breastfed herself. So going to a LLL meeting is a bit like reaching back through the centuries to find a bit of knowledge that you kind of knew already.
Yes, I paid $25 for a one-year membership to a club where I listen to people tell me things I already know. It's strange but wonderful, sitting in a room full of the squeals of children and squalls of babies and feeling, "Oh yeah, I knew that" about something that, frankly, I didn't.
Like biting.
I had been being bitten by Sweet Baby James on a semi-regular basis for the past few weeks. His teeth came in all of a sudden (six teeth over the course of two weeks, both top and bottom in the front. wowza!) and it's as if he didn't quite know what to do with them. And so, as always, he did whatever he liked. Unfortunately for me, whatever he liked included something very sharp and something very sensitive. Ouch.
So I asked about this at the meeting. The leader, as she is directed to do, reflected the question back to the larger group -- had anyone else experienced this? There was one Lactation Consultant-looking woman there (yes, there's an LC look. It involves being well-groomed, doing yoga and wearing handcrafted silver jewelry -- you know who you are) who suggested I de-latch the baby as soon as my milk had stopped flowing, since biting happens when the nipple is further forward in the mouth than when he's really gulping milk down.
Someone else suggested raising the angle of the baby's head, since they most comfortably latch when they're looking upward; and another lady commiserated, saying that she is doing extended breastfeeding with her daughter and not to worry, he would soon grow out of it.
That middle suggestion -- that the angle of the latch might be causing him to bite -- was actually new to me. But as they described it, I really felt like it wasn't. I felt like it was something I had known and forgotten, or maybe could have figured out on my own. A feeling not unlike the one you get from assembling a piece of IKEA furniture without the directions, only to find them hidden under your (also IKEA) couch.
There's much ado these days about how 'not instinctive' breastfeeding is -- the LLL magazine New Beginnings is full of stories from new moms who had terrible difficulties establishing the "breastfeeding relationship" after their baby was born. Thalia says,
"I wondered what could be so hard about something so natural. Hadn't we as a species done this from the beginning? I thought it was going to be easy. Not only was I wrong, but I was woefully unprepared for how wrong I was."
Diane says,
"Looking back now, both... [my husband and I] should have read a lot more and given a lot more thought on the subject."
But this non-instinctive stuff seems *ahem* counter-intuitive to me. How could we possibly survive as a species if the womanly art of breastfeeding wasn't hard-wired? And how come, given that I'm not a 100% insufferable jerk, do I feel like I 'know' this stuff already? Anthropologist Meredith Small asks the same question in her excellent book Our Babies, Ourselves: How biology and culture shape the way we parent.
She tells the story of a captive gorilla (Small doesn't say, but I'm assuming she was raised in isolation). This lady gorilla was able to carry and birth her cute little gorilla babies, but they kept getting taken away from her because she didn't know how to nurse them. She had the idea to connect her nipple with something on the baby's head -- but she didn't know that she needed to turn it around to face her. So the keepers got a bunch of human mothers to nurse their babies in front of her. She watched. She learned. She was able to feed her next baby!
So there is a strong learned aspect to breastfeeding. And perhaps this is the essence of intuition -- it's a combination of instinct and learning. It's important that we have good prenatal and prelactation classes available. But maybe, in our drive to be the master of everything in our domain, it's possible to be over-prepared, too. Might we, in our drive for self-education, run the risk of extinguishing the instinctual aspect of the nursing process?
I paid attention in the lactation section of our prenatal class at Montréal's (incredibleamazingawesome, cannotrecommenditenough) Côte de Neiges Maison de Naissance. I knew I wanted to breastfeed my baby and I knew it wasn't going to be easy. The videos showed us how we should hold (but not assault) the baby's head, how we should slightly compress our breast/nipple into the "hamburger shape" (hungry?), and how to tickle the baby's chin or cheek so that he would open up wide and I could shove that nipple in as far as it would go.
And when the baby came, I did all this. My nipples were sore, and there was a blood blister on one. I used a lot of Lanolin (a nice word for sheep grease) and cursing... I did everything they had told me to do -- but he didn't seem to be born with the open-up-wide-so-you-can-shove-your-nipple-in reflex.
I'd tickle his cheek or his chin and he'd open up a little bit, but not as much as he would at other times; or he wouldn't open up at all, preferring instead to suck heavily on his own hands, despite the fact that he was wailing with hunger only a moment before. I had a hectic, heavy letdown reflex (which is when the milk sprays out of the nipple like a sprinkler -- or Niagara Falls, as the case may be) so I'd be sitting there getting madder than a wet hen as the baby's fresh onesie got drenched, too.
And I was in pain. That blood blister developed into two. One of the tough things about starting to nurse is that you still have to continue to nurse on both breasts, even if one of them has a damaged nipple. Sometimes I would end up making it worse, since because it hurt like hell whether I was getting a good latch or not. I had no way to tell if I was on the right track!
One day, I just gave up. Not nursing, but trying. I gave up trying.
Baby was at my nipple, we were doing our usual three-round latchfight, and I just let him win. I didn't touch him or my breast. I watched. He didn't open his mouth wide like the babies in the video, but he sucked the nipple deep into his mouth, closed his eyes and gulped away. A perfect latch.
This was just my experience. But I hope that as we start to accept breastfeeding as an important aspect of childhood and maternal health, we can relax a little and give the formulaic nursing methods a break. I'm glad that I attended prenatal classes, but a class could never really prepare me for my baby knowing more than I do.
--------------------------
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