Company in America set up to sell breastmilk - what do you think?

[hunkermunker]

Story here

Part of me agrees that it's a commodity, like anything else, but another part of me thinks that it should be given freely.

hmm
I didn't understand what the fortifier was, just like human milk powder?
Heartbreaking bit about Alyssa Gordon

I don't know ... it certainly seems unfair that everyone involved is making money except for the mothers who are asked to donate their milk.

I didn't realise that, I found the story quite difficult to get the facts.
Yes, I agree, although I wouldn't want to be paid for donating milk, I wouldn't expect anyone else to profit either (apart from the babies!)
This is all theoretical for me, I struggle to express every oz.

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It does cost money to store and process the milk but surely not $30 per ounce. I don't have a problem with the donators not getting paid as it's thier choice to do it but I don't think anyone should be making huge profits from it.

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I read it and think 'only in America.'

If they had set up a company where normal parents could buy breast milk as opposed to hospitals buying the milk for sick children it would be different. I feel if people are donating to hospitals then systems should be put in place so no middle man profits.

Here i think the hospitals that do have milk banks run there own, which is better.

UK Milk banks charge other hospitals for the milk they supply, though, even though it goes to premies who do much better on it than without. Nothing in life is free.

i don't know, though. there are loads of things that we pay for that we should get for free... formula, imo, should be free or regulated and much cheaper.

if everyone's making money and the babies are getting BM when the parents would otherwise heave to pay for formula anyway, what's the diff? i think if women can lactate as a small business then great. why shouldn't something work to our biological advantage for once?

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Lifestyle questionnaires are all very well, but I'd hate to be in the legal firing line when it was discovered that one of the donating women was taking cocaine or had contracted HIV or something.

I was reading something a few months ago about how breast milk is a not uncommon sexual fetish - I don't know how they're going to monitor (or even if they care) that it IS all going to babies and not 45-year-old men in nappies.

I think that it was going to be hospitals buying it not individuals. I donated some milk with my first child to the milk bank in Southampton and they asked lifestyle questions etc, things like do you drink and they just asked not to express for 12 hours or so after having any alcohol. As I was bf anyway I only expressed a small amount each day for them, but I did it because I read somewhere that 100 babies die each year in Britain because they don't receive any breastmilk. This is of course mainly going to be ill and premie babies, exactly the ones that benefit from the milk donated to Southamptons milk bank.