Breast Milk Becomes a Commodity, with Mothers Caught Up in Debate
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The prices are set locally by each hospital but is currently at around $20-30 usd / liter, and has been raised a number of times over the last 10 years to encourage more people to donate milk. Hospitals buy milk from each other when necessary for somewhere around $100 per liter.
Donated milk is usually only accepted for the first three months after the donating mothers child was born. All equipment (pumps, bottles etc.) are provided by the hospital.
That said, I would encourage as many people as possible to donate milk, it makes a huge difference for those tiny prematurely born babies.
There's a similar concept for general antibody donation, which is given to the immune compromised, called intravenous immuno-globulin (IVIG)[0], which is extremely effective at modulating the immune system and enhancing immunity. Basically, they take blood donations, purify only (some) antibodies, and mix some 10,000 donors so that the resulting donation is well-rounded in its contents.
For some cultures, there has been an employment category called "wet nurses" whose entire job was to look after an infant and breastfeed it as a mother would. Perhaps as society becomes more an more unequal, we'll see a resurgence of wet nurses for rich infants.
Anecdata tells me that women who are stressed out won't produce much milk, so... I assume that's a significant number of people right there.
EDIT: Changed phrasing per reply
I'd say now with my second baby, at 11 months, 90% of the bedtime and morning nursings are pleasant bonding experiences, and half of the daytime ones.
The article describes a market where companies pay women for breast milk that is left over after they have fed their own babies, and use it to produce a pharmaceutical product for premature babies. The controversy is between non-profits and for profit companies both doing this (but the non-profit doesn't pay the women).
It's actually not that uncommon and in most cases these women are otherwise perfectly healthy and really want to breast feed.
Many non-physiological factors play a role here. For example how much pressure does the mother feel or put on herself. (typically with the first child because it's a new experience) How much stress does she have and so on.
We had to bottle feed her, and eventually the pumping wasn't enough to continue the supply, or allow the supply to fully "come in".
Later age is correlated with lower milk production, kicking up the demand http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/07/27/us-milk-production...
As a European, I have not been able to convince family members or friends that aren't intimately acquainted with the US-American situation that there is no universal, legislative framework for paid or unpaid maternity leave.
They usually respond with a variation of "this can't be right; you must be misinformed; it would be horrible if that were the case."
And you (as a populace) aren't even fighting for it! Not visibly, at least. So, honestly, you seem to be the one hurting all sorts of causes with this misdirected attitude of apologism.
Social good.
Where the state provides some or all of the financial assistance for parental leave, one could argue that it is already funded by all corporations, as it would be derived from tax income.
(And if every company were obligated to provide it, none would have a short-sighted competitive advantage over those who chose not to provide it.)
Yes there is, it's call the Family Medical Leave Act. It's a federal law that defines the minimum benefit offered.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_of...
When my sister developed health complications caused by her pregnancy, she had to quit her job. She had no other choice. But even if she hadn't quit, she would not have been eligible for FMLA. Now she is going through a divorce, and since she has no income, I am helping to pay her living expenses. My family is definitely feeling the ripple effects of our inadequate maternity leave laws in the U.S. right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Europe
...(certainly someone can correct me if I'm wrong). If a state wants to mandate maternity leave it can:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternity_leave_in_the_United_...
...In recent times, the states have seemingly ceded a lot of their power to the federal government. Maybe someday there will be an Article V convention and some of that will be reversed.
> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
If your argument ends in this conclusion, you should assume that there's a fallacy somewhere.
That's debatable.
Please don't throw drive-by explosives into Hacker News comments like that. All it does, predictably, is blow up the thread. Your comment had a fine substantive part, but that, of course, was the part that got ignored.
I've detached this subthread from its parent and marked it off-topic.