‘Dairy Godmother’ aids Montana moms in need
GREAT FALLS – Christina Nichter’s breast milk dried up with her first child.
That inspired her to donate surplus breast milk — eventually an astonishing 128 gallons — after her second baby arrived.
That’s about 1,100 pounds, more than the weight of a grand piano.
“I still remember the first day giving Cooper formula,” the Montana mom said of her firstborn son. “I cried hysterically.”
Nichter told herself that his needs were still being met, that his belly was still full and that she had nothing to feel guilty about. Still, she didn’t want another mother to experience the same stress when she had more than she needed the second time around.
She connected with the online breast milk-sharing network Human Milk 4 Human Babies.
Nichter also talked to the neonatal intensive care unit here and lactation consultants. She also became a donor through Mothers’ Milk Bank of Montana, which also serves Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.
Once she passed a health screening, the organization sent a cooler, which she filled with frozen milk and shipped back to Missou- la, where the milk bank is located.
Mother’s Milk Bank of Montana collects and screens milk donations, then pasteurizes and distributes the donor milk. The non-profit charges $4 an ounce for the milk, which is distributed to hospital neonatal intensive care units and families in need, its website says.
Hospitalized premature babies who are fed human breast milk suffer fewer severe infections and bowel problems and have a reduction in the growth of bad bacteria, according to the medical journal Paediatrics & Child Health.
Breastfeeding also helps protect babies from diarrhea, respiratory and urinary tract infections, diabetes, leukemia and obesity, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“Mother’s milk is the Rosetta stone for all food,” Bruce German, director of the University of California-Davis Foods for Health Institute, said in 2014.
A friend introduced Nichter to a mother in need outside of the milk bank. Soon Nichter was donating directly to mothers in Kalispell, Havre, Conrad, Choteau and Great Falls.
Nichter’s story appeared on the Ellen Nation website. Then the Today show called.
“When my husband came home, I told him, ‘I’m a celebrity.’ He said, ‘It’s about time.’ ”