Abstract
Peer human milk sharing (the giving of human milk from one person to another with the intention of feeding an infant) has emerged as a controversial practice in recent years. In this chapter, we consider the contemporary phenomenon of human milk sharing and banking through the lens of nineteenth- and twentieth-century concerns about syphilis and wetnursing. We draw on ethnographic observation, qualitative survey responses, and media representations of peer breast milk sharing to construct our analysis. We identify echoes of earlier concerns with morality and milk in contemporary conversations, noting an interesting contrast between alarmist media representations of peer milk sharing and the way in which milk-sharing mothers understand the risks and realities of peer milk sharing.
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Notes
- 1.
Although people frequently refer to the nursing of a child by a woman other than the biological mother as “wetnursing,” in this chapter wetnursing refers to a particular profession that involves compensation. Cross-nursing refers to the uncompensated nursing of a child by a woman other than the biological mother. In this particular case, the woman in question was describing her experience of cross-nursing.
- 2.
Peer milk sharing refers to the uncompensated transfer of breast milk from one parent to another. This may be in the form of cross-nursing or in the giving of expressed human milk. In an interesting parallel to the frequent confusion in the use of the term wetnursing, human milk sharing is frequently conflated with the sale and purchase of breast milk, though researchers (Stuebe et al. 2014; Reyes-Foster et al. 2015; Palmquist and Doehler 2016) argue the two are separate phenomena.
- 3.
Titmuss (1997) makes a similar argument about gifting versus selling blood.
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Reyes-Foster, B.M., Carter, S.K. (2018). Suspect Bodies, Suspect Milk: Milk Sharing, Wetnursing, and the Specter of Syphilis in the Twenty-First Century. In: Nixon, K., Servitje, L. (eds) Syphilis and Subjectivity . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66367-8_5
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