Company selling human breast milk for profit - female exploitation?

[Knoxinbox]

www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-58343016

1.To me, this seems wrong. Like the article says will women be tempted to donate milk that should be feeding their own babies for money? Even if it doesn’t affect their own babies getting an adequate supply, producing extra milk is not without its health costs to the mother. And I feel that if women are willing to donate milk then isn’t it better it goes to the NICU for premmies rather than for a company to make a profit?

I don’t know this just seems like yet another way to exploit and commercialise women’s bodies to the detriment of their health and possibly to their babies health too.

1. Aside form that, the other issue to me is that breast milk is a live product - full of antibodies from the woman’s immune system. Has there been any long term studies about the affects of consuming breastmilk from multiple sources and therefore multiple women’s white blood cells - could this have to potential to trigger an inflammatory disease in the baby years later?

I myself have an autoimmune arthritis condition as well as PCOS and IBS - and I’m aware that research shows that the longer I breastfeed my babies the more protected they will be from inflammatory diseases in later life. I fed my DD for 3 years and am still feeding 3 year old DS.

But obviously we have a close physical relationship where they have fed directly from my breast and so our immune systems have communicated with each other every day.

Has anyone studied the effects of just ingesting a strangers breastmilk on the recipients immune system long term?

Plan & Chatty I value your philosophical viewpoints, but what I can't understand is why would any woman go to get her milk expressed, expose herself to decalcification and a host of other issues for FREE knowing that someone will sell the milk for £150 a litre and she won't receive a penny. Can you comprehend that? I can't. Has the world gone mad? How can people be so utterly gullible?

I don't want to offend those who donate to milk banks that supply it for free and the NHS, by the way. I do understand that and I would do it also

@mustlovegin

Plan & Chatty I value your philosophical viewpoints, but what I can't understand is why would any woman go to get her milk expressed, expose herself to decalcification and a host of other issues for FREE knowing that someone will sell the milk for £150 a litre and she won't receive a penny. Can you comprehend that? I can't. Has the world gone mad? How can people be so utterly gullible?

I don't want to offend those who donate to milk banks that supply it for free and the NHS, by the way. I do understand that and I would do it also

I similarly do not understand women donating their milk for free to a company that then sells it for profit. For profit companies selling breast milk should be outlawed. I think the company is filling of gap of mothers who need breastmilk but don’t meet the strict medical criteria to get it from a milk bank. So these women genuinely want to help other mothers and probably think the end justifies the means (letting a company make a profit).

But as far as women donating milk to charity, I have no issue with it.

The risks are not very high in a rich western nation, it is very hard to suffer malnutrition from breast feeding. Simply ensuring you have adequate calcium intake solves decalcification. In addition, the human body will stop producing breast milk if the mother doesn’t have adequate nutrition. It’s why nursing babies and toddlers were a universal victim in famines in history.

In addition, there are benefits to producing breast milk. For example the longer you nurse or produce breast milk, the lower your risk of breast cancer. Pumping milk also releases oxytocin, a feel good hormone, so some women get a “high” out of it similar to the “high” that some people get through exercise. It also means, in a country where obesity and eating too much is a big problem, that you reduce your risk of developing obesity.

This is a really interesting article from the US about selling breastmilk and the politics around that including around race. mosaicscience.com/story/give-and-take-ethics-donating-breast-milk

I thought it was interesting that in the US the response of state government was to try to put in protections around selling, not ban selling. They don’t seem to see that allowing selling basically messes up donation as a system AND it means that the selling women’s own children are likely to get less or zero breast milk. And the crap amount of money you’d get for selling vast amounts of breast milk is exploitative. And objectively it is IS ‘crap’ relative to what the milk’s sold for- though a small income may help a seller with her immediate financial hardship. That equation is still exploitative. The lady in the article selling milk was just happy she could buy a new swing for her kids with the money. This ‘job’ of selling your own milk isn’t making anyone rich (except the commercial company owners ) it’s not a real job, is it. Pensions, prospects, holiday pay? Expenses for the extra healthy food you need to lactate without depleting your body? No of course not. Buyer AND seller should be very careful.

Yet in this article permitting selling is encouraging the adulteration of the sold milk that they found (with cow’s milk). Selling seems likely to deter some would-be donors from donating. The exploitative nature of selling and how that works with vulnerable and desperate sellers and buyers means that ever more stringent checks and invasive requirements will be needed on sellers and increasingly more expenses for the women selling it and parents buying it put in to ensure it is all safe. Profit rests only in the hands of the middleman, with great exploitation potential on either side for the sellers and buyers. It’s not even efficient to work this exploitatively.

This is why I think in the UK we should be arguing for an urgent national scale up of donation ASAP so it’s more available to donors and babies who need it. And we should be urgently making legislation that bans sale of breast milk because it’s socially and medically irresponsible not to protect women and babies.

It would seem safer that breastmilk should be only available in the UK via donation and only when prescribed medically for a baby to receive it. We should be learning from the legal safeguarding that organ and blood donation have around them. You can’t legally sell or buy those body products which is absolutely right.

Also from this article from Lancet from 2021, it’s clear that some breast milk donation programmes will need to professionalise or standardise their working. Often scaling up tends to reduce unnecessary variation in standards in any industry, which is a good thing in a sensitive area like this. While you don’t want to throw out the gift relationship that small or local organisations can support with donors and the parents. So it’s not an easy balance to strike. But clear legal safeguards will always be the necessary starting point. We don’t seem to have those yet in the UK. Why not? And why is this area still so under researched?

Human milk banks: a need for further evidence and guidance
www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2214-109X%2820%2930468-X

I meant to link to the Atlantic article thats I think written by same journalist, with other case studies in it: www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/408202/

Good post @ChattyLion
The US in general has fewer protections for workers than EU/U.K. and so they do allow systems that are clearly exploitation of vulnerable people- poor, women, minorities, etc.

The only thing I question is AND it means that the selling women’s own children are likely to get less or zero breast milk.. Breast milk supply rises to meet demand. It’s not finite like say blood or organs. For example, my sister exclusively breastfed twins. Each baby didn’t get half what a single baby would get, no, her body produced double the usual amount of breastmilk. Wetnurses even in the past commonly breast fed their own baby plus their employers baby...and neither went without because employers wouldn’t hire a wet nurse with a sickly baby. The health of her baby was advertisement as to how good a wet nurse she was. In short, if a woman has a good supply, she can indeed pump enough extra at least for one other baby without it harming her supply for her baby.

I think the company is filling of gap of mothers who need breastmilk but don’t meet the strict medical criteria to get it from a milk bank.

That presupposes that the company screens would-be-buyers. Does it?

The Guardian article linked to earlier lists bodybuilding men as one of the main groups buying breast milk, alongside health-conscious people as well as those undergoing chemotherapy (they all seemed to be men).

I think it would be irresponsible to buy milk like this for your baby, when the company cannot meet FSA guidelines on food production and does not seem to regularly test donors for sexually transmitted diseases.

A not-for-profit organisation, working with the NHS, and that takes donated milk and gives it to mothers in need who are referred, is different in my view.

This for-profit company is just one in a long line that commodifies women's bodies. And the Guardian article makes clear that the women selling their milk do so because they need the money. Commodification of women goes hand in hand with their exploitation.

This should not be legal.

I agree with you Charley
Feels like the charitable donation milk banks should be the only ones to fill the gap for babies benefit here. If @MilkBankMum is still on the thread maybe they can comment on how they do the safety side of it but the video they linked to mentioned pasteurisation I think. The rest of the market of buyers should not be buying this.

When it’s women’s bodies and risks legally it seems like we’re centuries behind the times so we don’t have any protections in place around selling our body products at the moment. That puts vulnerable women and their babies at physical risk. That’s why ‘she can just sell it for a fairer price’ or ‘but she consented’ do not solve that fundamental inherent problem of exploitation.

And the buyers, the baby or adult end users of the bought milk are also seemingly without proper legal health safeguards either so that is also exploitative.

Where are the medical professional and baby and maternity patient charities and cancer charities and body building groups all commenting on this sale of human body products? OK It’s not illegal at the moment but nobody needs to wait for the law to say that its extremely socially unacceptable to exploit women and their babies. It is unacceptable. They should be speaking up.