Would you feed your baby breastmilk from a woman you found online?
Rebecca and Lauren, who struggle to produce enough of their own, both do. But doctors warn they may be taking a terrible risk ...
AS A committed healthy eater, mother-of-two, Rebecca Poole fully took on board the oft-trumpeted advice that ‘breast is best’ and was determined to nurse her babies for as long as possible.
Sadly, that turned out to be rather more difficult than she’d anticipated. Despite her best efforts, breastfeeding just didn’t seem to ‘work’ for her and baby, Lily, who’s now three.
So she resorted to formula milk — a psychological trauma that proved so great Rebecca ended up on antidepressants.
After the birth of her second child, Theo, last February, when the same supply problems reared their head, Rebecca opted to do what she considered ‘the next best thing’: feed him another woman’s breast milk.
Incredible though it may seem to those who thought wet nursing was a practice from a bygone age, Rebecca, 33, is among a growing army of women receiving expressed breast milk from other mothers. Perhaps inevitably, these transactions occur over the internet.
‘I realise that many people, even some of my family and friends, find it weird that I’m happy to feed my baby someone else’s breast milk,’ admits Rebecca, who tutors personal trainers. ‘But I think any mother who has been determined to exclusively breastfeed her child, and then found herself unable to do so, will understand.’
So much is known about the benefits of nursing babies for as long as possible. The World Health Organisation recommends you do it for a year — as it boosts their immune systems and their brain power, and some studies have even suggested that human milk could help kill off cancerous cells.
‘Not being able to produce enough for Lily was devastating. I would be in tears making up bottles of formula because I knew it wasn’t as good for her,’ says Rebecca.
‘So when I realised that Theo, who was 10lb 3oz at birth, wasn’t gaining weight, I tried everything to boost my supply, including taking a milk- enhancing medication, Domperidone, from my GP, before searching for someone willing to share hers with me.’
Rebecca came across the Facebook page for an organisation called Human Milk 4 Human Babies UK, where she posted a request for a breast milk donor.
That same day, two mums living within an hour of her home in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, volunteered their services ( the group operates on an entirely altruistic basis). After corresponding with both, Rebecca chose Sarah McHugh, whose child was two months younger than Theo and who lived in nearby Kidderminster. A few nights later Rebecca drove to Sarah’s house, in what the two women said felt like an ‘ illicit exchange’, to collect bags of her frozen breast milk.
‘Of course, I had my reservations and was keen to meet Sarah in her home environment,’ says Rebecca. ‘I wouldn’t want to give my fourmonthold baby milk that came from a dirty house, or from someone I couldn’t trust to wash their hands, because I’d worry it would put him at risk of infections.
‘But I was reassured the minute I pulled up outside. It was a beautiful, well-maintained house with a nice car on the driveway.
‘Also, I was lucky because Sarah told me that she donates to hospital neonatal wards, and she explained that she had been through their stringent screening process to ensure she didn’t have any diseases and was trained in ensuring the milk was sterile.’
MUMS with healthy babies, such as Rebecca — who, as well as giving Theo Sarah’s milk, is also breastfeeding as much as she can manage herself — cannot access these limited hospital supplies, reserved for premature and sick infants.
But because increasing numbers of women are determined to breastfeed their children at any cost, doctors and public health experts have grave concerns about the growing, unregulated, practice of milk sharing — and the risk of infection it poses to infants. Dr Sarah Steele, a senior public health researcher at Jesus College, Cambridge, who has done extensive work in this area, warns: ‘Would I feed my infant milk off the internet? Definitely not. How can you possibly know how safely it was expressed and stored?
‘Despite having the best of intentions, you could be passing on HIV, hepatitis, syphilis or, if the mother hasn’t washed her hands properly, a food-borne illness such as E.coli or salmonella which can, in worst-case scenarios, lead to death.’
While working on her recent paper, Risks of the Unregulated Market in Human Breast Milk, Dr Steele bought breast milk online for testing, and also looked at the results of similar studies.
A fifth of the samples contained cytomegalovirus, an infection which can cause hearing and vision loss in babies, as well as brain damage.
SOME also had traces of illicit drugs and BPAs, a chemical found in some plastics which is potentially harmful and therefore banned from use in baby bottles, cups and dummies. The majority were infected with bacteria resulting from poor storage and transportation.
As the milk, mostly bought online in the U.S. where there is a burgeoning trade, was sold by the ounce, some was also bulked out with cow’s milk, dangerous for babies under 12 months old.
‘Of course, there isn’t the same financial incentive for anyone to do this when milk is being donated [in the case of Rebecca and Sarah] rather than sold,’ says Dr Steele. ‘But even the most well-meaning of donors can unintentionally put a baby at risk. For example, many mums who express milk after going back to work do so in the loos.
‘So, they touch a door handle on the way in and may inadvertently transfer germs on to the pump.
‘And even if blood tests during pregnancy were negative for diseases such as HIV and hepatitis, a mother is at risk of contracting these the moment she becomes sexually active again.’
Lauren Roberts, 34, who is on maternity leave from her job in education marketing, is using her second milk donor for five-monthold son, Leo.
Her difficulties began on the postnatal ward when Leo, who weighed 8lb 2oz at birth, struggled to latch onto the breast. Lauren says there was not enough support from overstretched midwives to get feeding properly established before she was discharged.
The day after getting home, worried that her son was struggling to feed, Lauren paid £120 for a breastfeeding counsellor to spend two hours with mum and baby.
However, he still struggled to latch
on, so Lauren started supplementing with formula milk.
When Lauren confided in a friend about how sad she felt at having to give her baby powdered milk, she told her about the online sharing groups.
Lauren posted an appeal on Human Milk 4 Human Babies explaining that she had a fourweekold and was looking for mums with surplus milk local to her in West London.
A mum-of-three, who lived just around the corner and whose youngest is two months older than Leo — not ideal, as, according to Dr Steele, the make-up of a mother’s breast milk changes as her baby ages, ensuring it is precisely what the child needs at that stage — offered to help, and Lauren went to meet her in a café.
‘We had a long chat and, although I didn’t interrogate her, she told me she’s a teacher, which reassured me that she’s the sort of person to have children’s best interests at heart, rather than feed them anything that would put them at risk,’ says Lauren.
‘She also mentioned that she’s a bit of a clean freak, so I knew she would handle her expressed milk hygienically.
‘I didn’t worry she might have, or take, something that could harm my baby, because, as she was also feeding her son, it would have posed a risk to him, too.’
The woman, a first-time donor who had been expressing for her own baby and ended up with more than she needed, dropped bags of frozen milk round later that day.
‘The first time I gave Leo another mother’s milk did feel strange,’ admits Lauren. ‘I felt sad I couldn’t produce enough for him on my own, but at the same time I was happy I could still give him breast milk, because it’s so much better for a baby’s development.’
LAuren’S
own breast milk has now dried up and, after her first donor finished breastfeeding her own child, she has found a second supplier, a local woman whom she met at a coffee morning.
While Lauren has fully embraced milk sharing, her husband, nick, a financial controller, ‘thought it was weird at first. But I told him I’d met both ladies and he said: “If you feel it’s the best thing to do, then that’s fine”.’
But the unregulated social media world of breast- milk sharing has led SnP MP Alison Thewliss, chair of the allparty parliamentary group for infant feeding, to call for a national breast milk bank for women such as Lauren and rebecca, run in accordance with nICe guidelines, to supplement the 16 official outlets in hospitals across the uK and Ireland.
‘ It’s critical we get the message across that breast is best and improve the rates,’ says Dr Steele. Britain has one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, with only 34 per cent of mothers still doing it at six months.
‘However, due to the research published, some mothers who struggle to feed then worry that formula will lead to their children being obese and having lower IQs than breastfed babies.
‘Taking that message too much to heart can lead to some extreme behaviour, such as getting breast milk online.
‘These mothers may argue that women have wet nursed for millennia, but that’s different to getting milk from a stranger on Facebook, with the risk of it containing viruses that didn’t exist a century ago.’
But Kirsty Wickings, 27, from York, who has altruistically donated milk to three infants, including premature twins whose mother had died in childbirth, says what she does is important. Her son, Zak, was born last August with tongue tie, which made latching on difficult, so from the beginning, she expressed her milk to feed him from bottles.
Kirsty, who runs an IT forensics company with partner robert, 27, produced such vast quantities that she decided to offer the excess through social media.
‘I felt so sad for the little twins who had lost their mother and it was lovely being able to help them in some way,’ says Kirsty.
‘Family friends would collect the milk and take it to the babies in the special-care unit.’
Kirsty stopped expressing a couple of months ago and, with Zak still only five months old and all her stock gone, she is now appealing for milk donors online. ‘robert was very supportive of me supplying milk, but he can’t see the point in me looking for a donor for Zak, especially as the two who offered live too far away. But he wouldn’t mind his son having another woman’s milk.’
However, Dr Jens Foell, a GP who has also been involved in research into the online trade in breast milk, says that while sharing between sisters or close friends, for example, may be a good thing, ‘ women mustn’t be driven to these desperate lengths because they believe they’re only a good mother if they can give their baby breast milk’.
Dr Foell adds: ‘ Formula is a perfectly adequate alternative if feeding isn’t possible.’