Super Eco

Photo credit: The Mining Journal

When now two-month-old Charles Moses Martin Goodrich's mother died just hours after giving birth, an entire group of Michigan mothers mobilized to breastfeed the infant. "What amazes me is they are so committed," says family friend Nicoletta Fraire, who helped organize and schedule the ongoing effort. "They would do it for anyone because they believe in this. They didn't take it lightly and they don't miss a day."

Despite this demonstration of community solidarity, a nationally representative Babytalk survey last year showed that 45% of respondents find nursing another woman’s baby “disgusting” or “weird,” though wet nurses used to be fairly common practice. Modern acceptance for cross-nursing, as it's become known, continues to inch forward among the country’s growing number of breastfeeding mothers.

Breastfeeding the baby of a trusted family member in a committed relationship has different ramifications than giving your baby breast milk from a donor you may have met only on the internet. Doctors and lactation specialists warn mothers of the potential dangers of  sharing breast milk—a body fluid, after all—from any unscreened source. “It’s like having sex with someone,” cautions Amy Vickers, executive director of the Mother’s Milk Bank of North Texas. “You have to trust all the people that the donor has ever trusted.” The only 100 percent safe way to share milk, she says, is through a milk bank, where donors are screened and tested and milk is pasteurized.

Safe donor milk guidelines

• Use tested, screened milk from a Human Milk Banking Association of North America-certified milk bank.
• If you can’t get a doctor’s prescription for milk from a milk bank, look for donors through Milk Share. Screen potential donors for healthy lifestyles and insist on testing for HIV, hepatitis, herpes, syphilis, tuberculosis, cytomegalovirus, strep and staph.
• Choose a donor whose baby is near the age of your own, since the composition of a mother’s milk changes over time to match her baby’s needs.