the breast milk trade

[quote EmpressCixi]@PurgatoryOfPotholes

I’m not sure I follow you. You wrote correctly that power cuts make it hygienically hard to formula feed due to no way to sterilise water or bottles and similarly if feeding expressed breast milk a power cut would affect stored bottles of breast milk in the refrigerator or freezer.

So evidently power cuts would derail any kind of infant feeding other than breast feeding.

So isn’t any feeding other than breastfeeding equally “precarious” due to power cuts? And how often do these power cuts happen in the UK anyway? Not often enough to affect mothers who formula feed, so it would follow they do not happen often enough to affect mothers who feed expressed breast milk either.

Formula is regulated to ensure it is safe to feed to a baby, but breastmilk currently is not. So surely regulation of breastmilk to ensure hygiene and safe supply as we do for formula would be the right way to go here.[/quote]
Formula is sold as powder (doesn't spoil while the freezer is off) or in ready prepared bottles (you will encounter these most often in hospitals which buy them in bulk) which also doesn't go off if the power is interrupted. Expressed milk in the freezer does and it cannot be easily replaced from the supermarket.

Power cuts do happen, and their frequency is likely to increase (but that is another thread). It is one of the reasons I prefer to breastfeed. Did you not realise how many people lost power for days during Storm Arwen?

@PurgatoryOfPotholes

Yes, it’s right there
If a pump demands it my body makes it.

MY BODY. The poster was clearly referring to HER BODY, not all womens’ bodies like you are interpreting it as.

And don't forget, we had someone explicitly suggesting last night that women sell milk they'd expressed and frozen, while formula feeding their own baby.

Saying the quiet bit loud, that was.

@PurgatoryOfPotholes

I’m not sure I follow you. You wrote correctly that power cuts make it hygienically hard to formula feed due to no way to sterilise water or bottles and similarly if feeding expressed breast milk a power cut would affect stored bottles of breast milk in the refrigerator or freezer.

So evidently power cuts would derail any kind of infant feeding other than breast feeding.

So isn’t any feeding other than breastfeeding equally “precarious” due to power cuts? And how often do these power cuts happen in the UK anyway? Not often enough to affect mothers who formula feed, so it would follow they do not happen often enough to affect mothers who feed expressed breast milk either.

Formula is regulated to ensure it is safe to feed to a baby, but breastmilk currently is not. So surely regulation of breastmilk to ensure hygiene and safe supply as we do for formula would be the right way to go here.

So the milk cannot “belong” to a baby unless the baby owns it.

Does the milk for a baby cow belong to the calf? Does the calf own it? Does the cow own it? Or because the farmer owns the cow, does he own it?

I stand by that comment but I would use the language of 'for the baby', as in, the milk from a mother's breast is for the baby, not her husband, the body builder she sells it to, the other woman she sells it to for that woman's baby. It is expressly made for the baby or babies that came from that woman's body. Donating it to other babies who need it via a milk bank is not remotely like selling it to whoever you want.

A baby doesn't own it's mother but relies on his or her mother primarily for food and care (ie survival). The link between them should not be conflated into ownership/commercial activities/capitalist enterprise in my view.

It's right there. No disclaimers being made. Just "milk is made on demand".

The woman and her husband hired him as a sperm donor and paid him to have sex with her.

If not an affair (he was also married so he was having an affair, he cheated on his wife), then he was paid for sex (that is prostitution) with a view to her becoming pregnant. Why you pay someone for sex doesn't remove the fact that you are paying them for sex.

What has this got to do with breastmilk?

Yes you wrote that “the breastmilk belongs to the baby”.
Now the verb “belongs to” means ownership of something. So the milk cannot “belong” to a baby unless the baby owns it.

belong to: to be the property of: The book belongs to her

@PurgatoryOfPotholes
I saw a woman tell us we were ignorant and pumping was a matter of supply and demand.

No, the woman said @OhHolyJesus was ignorant in her insistence that a woman cannot possibly safely feed more than one baby with her breastmilk and that for her breastfeeding is about supply and demand with the pump acting as a demand stimulant for her to then produce milk.

The situation was that because Japan has made is almost impossible to get artificial insemination through a clinic, Japanese women are resorting to finding sperm donors through social media. And yes, they have to have sex with them to fall pregnant. This is a horrible situation and directly caused by Japan deciding to just tell women “no you can’t have artificial insemination, stay childless”

The woman and sperm donor were not having an affair. The woman and her husband hired him as a sperm donor and paid him to have sex with her. But because he lied about his education, and ethnicity they have put the baby up for adoption and are now sueing him for fraud.

The woman loses her rights as a person and her body is now owned by the baby

No. I wrote belong not own. You can centre a mother's autonomy to sell her breast milk but you do not get to do so without recognising why the milk is there in the first place.

The baby owns no part of its mother ever.

Who is the milk for? Why does a mother's body make it? What is the biological purpose?

I have certainly seen people claim all women can pump elsewhere (and that they are selfish if they breastfeed in public instead of pumping in advance).

[quote EmpressCixi]@PurgatoryOfPotholes
But I very clearly do see a comparison between posts telling women they can earn money for maternity leave selling milk, and posts telling young women they can earn money for uni selling sex.

You can compare all you like, but the two are more different than alike. For one selling your breast milk doesn’t involve any other human being in the room with you or seeing or touching you as you pump unlike selling sex or doing sex work. Secondly, the primary buyer of breastmilk is another mother and the customer an innocent baby who simply needs breastmilk to survive. Whereas in sex work the primary buyer are horny men and the sex is for gratification purposes only.

Really the only point of comparison is that the seller is a woman.[/quote]
You're hyping up the emotional language there.

If the primary customer is "another mother", why is she feeding her baby in the most precarious fashion whatsoever?

It has the hygiene drawbacks of formula bottlefeeding, (sterilising bottles, heating it up to the correct temperature, and so on) and you can't even get hold of the milk in the local supermarket. It's not a teaspoonful either. You have to obtain 500ml to 1litre of milk per day, depending on age.

Powercuts are bad for formulafeeding mums (can't boil the kettle to prepare the formula, or use the steamer to sterilise the bottles for the next feed). Imagine what it would be like to have the electricity supply to the freezer interrupted, with all the expressed milk bottles in it.

When women choose a sperm donor that they will have to have sex

Having to have sex with someone is very much not in the realms of donating gametes. The process is built around the absence of sex, even artificial insemination removed the act of sex.

Men who insist on 'natural insemination' are coercively raping women. If you want to blame the lack of a legal framework for that, then go right ahead.

The story you refer to is here

nypost.com/2022/01/12/woman-places-baby-for-adoption-after-learning-sperm-donor-lied/?fbclid=IwAR0VshAa-TtMNw3sEJxNjHqIbjynxMpGY2jD2IEF0HOHqViB1FAwQVROnfY

These two married people had an affair. The man lied and the woman took him at his word. The resulting child's DNA didn't meet her requirement so she had the child adopted as it was too far along in her pregnancy to abort.

Nothing here refers to breast milk, donation of breast milk or the sale of breast milk.

I used to donate my milk to the local maternity hospital. A midwife collected it every couple of days and I was paid. I didn't want the money but she said the rules were they had to pay me how much it would cost me in food to produce that amount of milk. Heaven knows how they worked that out but it wasn't alot.

They provided sterilised bottles for the milk to be stored in.

@OhHolyJesus
I thought the breast milk a mother produced was for her baby, strictly speaking doesn't it belong to the baby?

For fuck sake, no a woman’s body does not belong to her baby ever. That’s the same argument anti-abortionists use to try and ban abortion. They argue that once conceived, the woman’s body now is subordinate to the needs of the unborn baby. The woman loses her rights as a person and her body is now owned by the baby. You’re just applying that argument to a baby after birth. The baby owns no part of its mother ever.

@PurgatoryOfPotholes
But I very clearly do see a comparison between posts telling women they can earn money for maternity leave selling milk, and posts telling young women they can earn money for uni selling sex.

You can compare all you like, but the two are more different than alike. For one selling your breast milk doesn’t involve any other human being in the room with you or seeing or touching you as you pump unlike selling sex or doing sex work. Secondly, the primary buyer of breastmilk is another mother and the customer an innocent baby who simply needs breastmilk to survive. Whereas in sex work the primary buyer are horny men and the sex is for gratification purposes only.

Really the only point of comparison is that the seller is a woman.

women that pumping is easy and you can earn some money doing

Pumping and/or breastfeeding is actually easy for many women. It was for me. No one is telling women that all women can pump just like we know not all women can breastfeed. No one is saying it is easy for all women. But the fact is what is easy for some women is hard for some women, and impossible for some women.

What is so wrong about the women who find it easy selling their milk to the women who find it impossible? It’s a sister helping a sister out.

[quote OhHolyJesus]@EmpressCixi

Why was the man's sperm meant to be of more value if he had a degree? Regardless of whether he lied or not, was he expected to charge more because his DNA was of more value?

Why would his sperm be of more value? [/quote]
When women choose a sperm donor that they will have to have sex with they often want the donor to be intelligent, noncriminal, no genetic diseases and the same ethnicity as themselves or their husband as well as decent looking, Having a degree makes you more likely to be chosen by women looking for a sperm donor.

But I very clearly do see a comparison between posts telling women they can earn money for maternity leave selling milk, and posts telling young women they can earn money for uni selling sex.

All we need now to make the picture complete in MRAs saying women are privileged over men because they can support their babies selling milk whereas men have to go out and work proper jobs.

Ever wondered about that? It's because no-one knows about the growth spurt at six weeks. They then conclude that their bodies don't make enough milk and switch to formula. Yes, lies and false information are damaging to women's breastfeeding journeys.

I do not really see any comparison between breastfeeding women and their babies existing in public and people telling women that pumping is easy and you can earn some money doing it. It is already a huge issue that people do not understand the physiological differences between pumping and a baby's latch. As you yourself found, your breasts didn't respond to the machine's suction, because suction is a poor simulacrum of breastfeeding. Yet women, especially in America, get told that they should pump milk and bottlefeed for public feeds, to save other people seeing it. People say "if you can breastfeed, why not pump!".

It is not the same process.

You said normalising selling milk minimises awareness of the physical challenges so can be emotionally and in this case financially challenging for women putting it into their maternity plan. Doesn’t all that apply to breastfeeding too? That young women absorb the narrative that it’s easy and this is damaging to their breastfeeding journey when they find they physically can’t ?

^Is that fair? I HATE pumping, and don’t get a lot. I didnt have support around with my first two and they weren’t the easiest of babies so pumping involved sitting there and trying to look after baby while feeling like a cow and feeling miserable that I couldn’t cuddle my baby, plus it took multiple sessions to get a bottle. Obviously I didn’t pump a lot. Friends however filled freezers with ease.
However, I breastfed fairly easily. We have a huge issue in the uk with normalising breastfeeding and need to improve breastfeeding rates. Am I, by whipping out a boob and feeding baby on the bus, minimising the physical and supply challenges other women have breastfeeding? Am I being like a male prostitution advocate who has no idea that unwanted penetration hurts?^

Do you actually think that I am saying that going about your life breastfeeding your baby is like lobbying for the normalising of women selling their milk?