The ethics of donating breast milk
mosaicscience.com
mosaicscience.com
He described it as:
1. Breast milk is, hands down, the best nutrition a baby can have. Babies in the NICU need it, there's a massive shortage, and we can't match its nutritional value with formula, period.
2. A woman will continue producing breast milk as long as she continues either feeding or pumping, even if her child is too old.
3. There's a desperate shortage in the US, because people don't want to take the time to come to the donation facility for the blood tests, and those are very expensive to do by mail.
Basically, what he's doing is paying women in Cambodia for their breast milk. A woman in Cambodia will donate her milk for a few dollars a day, and it completely changes her lifestyle. Women are willing to come to their facilities to be tested, and are willing to go through background checks that make sure they're not neglecting their in doing so.
They can then export the breast milk to places that have shortages (like the US), and make a profit.
Domestically it's regulated by the FDA like a foodstuff (beans or corn), and it can be homogenized just like cow's milk.
It takes a while to get over the weird factor, but it seems like economically it's a win-win. I'd be curious to see if anyone else would consider this exploitative. I've gone back and forth.
Are there numbers on this? I've seen some debunking things recently on stuff like "Breast feeding = smarter babies", and I don't believe it can be nutrition that we're missing? I thought it was more to do with antibodies and the like? In which case are "non-local" antibodies the thing that is actually needed?
I know sod all, just curious
There's a lot of evidence pointing towards the fact that the bacteria in our bodies have more to do with the health of us than we ever realized before. Which is why fecal implants are such a successful procedure.
The author of the book "Brain Rules for Baby" is on the side that breastfeeding leads to smarter babies (~5 IQ points?), and claims that the principles in the book are backed up by peer-reviewed research.
As for the mechanism behind it, not sure this is known. I've heard speculation that it is the antibodies, and that breastfed kids have a little extra learning time since they aren't distracted with as many illnesses. But I've also heard that receptors on the mother's breasts react to the babies saliva, resulting in milk nutrient profile slightly customized to the baby's current needs (so, would donated milk not have the same effect?).
[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
In my anecdotal observation, however, it's far more common to decide against it due to discomfort or inconvenience, often prompted by an initial difficulty getting started. We just aren't taught how to do it any more. We have formula for that.
Emotional reactions are real and cannot be argued away - people feel the way they feel. It takes cultural change to make it ok; and there are probably too many changes that have to happen together to succeed at that.
But some women are truly unable, and unfortunately they are often lumped in with the "I'll bounce back to my preprego body faster if I don't" group.
And, it's worth noting, some of those women are pressured by obnoxio clown-men to do exactly that.
I suppose it's weird for those who have never seen a cow being milked before, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was true for a large number of the (city-dwelling) population.
How is it a "donation" when they're being paid for it? Farmers aren't "donating" the milk when we pay them for it.
We've been lied to for decades, and our too-smart-for-that-malarkey grandmothers are dead.
This is a good addition to the what-will-future-generations-think-we-were-stupid-about lists.
In fact, even imagining such a society seems absurd, but that is how our current culture is (at least where I've lived at).
But of course the issue is, partially disrobing in public. We all know this. And the more mothers respond by not breastfeeding in public, the less the public sees it and the less they are inured to the sight. So the taboo gets stronger.
How many people who grew up exclusively in an urban setting have seen a cow being milked? I think that's a huge part of the grossness factor. Someone who grew up on a farm and sees cows being milked periodically will think nothing much of it.
And pumping itself is a relatively new phenomenon. Not the ideal way to effect the goal, but a sometimes necessary practical compromise. I can think of plenty of reasons not to like it.
For first-time mothers, those whose babies were delivered by Caesarean section, and mothers of preemies, the milk supply can take even longer to start.
Breastmilk is better than formula but formula beats no food at all or too little to sustain a child.
This sort of thinking (from the article) actually makes things harder for new mums who can feel pressure to breastfeed and avoid formula. Breastfeeding is not easy nor is it always possible. The whole article could have made the same poi t without blaming formula for contributing to the death of the infant.
I guess this form of "mommy guilt" is well in line with the trend of every person you meet having their own opinion about every aspect of child raising. Where I'm really starting to think that, outside of the advice of your pediatrician (who should never be ignored), most of it really does not matter at all.
But I also observe that part of that is driven (at least, in America, where you seem to also be located) by the conceptual societal framework that has led kids to understand you should only be with people who don't criticize you, and my wife and I heard from several people while she was pregnant that we 'need to find our tribe,' where we try to exclusively spend our social time in a sub-group of people that share our philosophies on child-rearing and related fields. I reject this line of thinking as needlessly polarizing, and I think that if you only are with your tribe, you're going to be messing up your kid the same way everyone else in that tribe messes up their kids (and I also observe that every generation of Americans since the 'Greatest Generation' complains about how their parents raised them, I don't expect my children's generation to be any different)
In other cultures, if mom is unable to produce enough milk, there were other moms to help. That's too weird for us now, so it's formula or some other second rate substitution.
The hardest part about infant nutrition is that passing on knowledge about it isn't a part of modern American culture, and so when we had our son, we felt we had to do a lot of reading and research to figure out what was the best thing to do.
And it's tragic, although understandable from a certain perspective, that a significantly lower portion of [statistically speaking] lower-income African American women do not plan to breastfeed. Tragic solely in the cost savings that it could be for them that could help them slowly make their way out of poverty. (Yes, yes, structural societal issues aside, I mean for them individually).
It also appears pretty true that almost anything involving infants, birth, and the fuzziness of medical ethics provokes strong reactions from those involved. Hopefully, the focus will remain on doing the best thing, and less on doing the thing that people yell the most about.
Maybe it's because I'm a dad, but I would have no problem if the bank teller happened to have a baby latched onto her breast while she was processing my deposit. Many office jobs would not be significantly impaired if a mom were to bring in her infant. I think it's sad that we've constructed a society that has become very hostile to children (and elderly but that's a topic for a different day). Contrast with rural Asian cultures where you see babies strapped to the backs of their moms while they are in the rice fields or conducting commerce. If anything, carrying a child around during work in those conditions is "more inconvenient" than in our modern places of work.
A very cursory google search tells me that MSPI only appears to be related to soy and cow's milk. Am I googling wrongly?
New dumb startup idea: match women like your wife with women who are lactose/soy intolerant (but whose babies aren't), and do a milk swap!
There are informal milk swaps, but part of the deal is that the way the biology works, it's better for the baby to have their own mother's milk ( if you're giving another mother's milk, it's statistically not much different than formula [to anyone reading, I know this is a controversial statement simplifying a complex issue]).
We'd love to see the excess used productively (she's literally pumping and dumping gallons of the stuff every week). Unfortunately, the litigious nature of US ensures that this is a non starter, as we are unable to find anyone willing to give us an assurance that we are free of liability if a child became ill after drinking my wife's milk.
When I had minor issues with breast feeding, I was able to resolve them myself in spite of nurses being zero help. When someone close to me had trouble breastfeeding, I did not know the answer but was able to be emotionally supportive of her and helped her get over any guilt or bullshit social messages about how this should be easy and natural for both her and baby. She also was able to find solutions in spite of the stupid things people around her were saying.
I suspect this is easier for women in cultures where women have more babies on average and breastfeeding is more the norm. It is a situation where you have much better odds of being personally acquainted with someone who had the same issue and can tell you how to fix it. I was appalled by the really crappy attitudes I was surrounded by and the dearth of practical solutions.
Perhaps importing breast milk makes that problem "worse", but you at least are able to feed your baby, which is actually the more important issue.
"Despite the ban on persistent organochlorines (OCs) in most of the developed nations, their usage continued until recently in many Asian developing countries including Vietnam, for agricultural purposes and vector-borne disease eradication programs."
"This result suggests recent usage of DDTs in both north and south Vietnam" (2004)
"Analysis of infant exposure to DDTs via breast milk suggested that the daily intake rates are close to or above the threshold for adverse effects on children health"
Source. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749103...
Formula is pretty much the equivalent of junk food. You can live on it, but not optimally.