Zeno's Bar & Grill

It’s in the news again: the story about women sharing pumped breast milk, either through informal local alliances among friends or relatives, regulated milk banks or a busy marketplace over the internet. Seriously.

This is a trend that carries heavy potential costs for mothers. When obtaining milk from milk banks that utilize pasteurization and formal donor screening, it’s a literal cost in dollars and cents. According to several sources such as this one, banked human breast milk is about $3.00 per ounce. At that price, it could cost upwards of $60 per day to feed one baby. Even Rachael Ray eats for less than that. To put it into perspective, that’s over ten times the cost of typical baby formulas. Obtaining milk by the alternatives that don’t involve formal screening is less expensive but has another set of costs—the possibility of exposing one’s infant to drugs or transmissible disease agents like HIV.

We can’t help wondering if the desperation to provide breast milk at any price is another manifestation of the ridiculously high standards being imposed on parents these days. This business of putting breast milk on a pedestal seems like another way of driving mothers insane one little piece at a time. Before you peg us as militant anti-La Leche Leaguers, you should know that we nursed our own children long enough to get funny looks when they got old enough to ask for it in complete sentences. But we also know that nursing isn’t an option (or even a desire) for everyone.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the prevailing common wisdom was to say, “It’s okay to give your baby formula if you can’t (or don’t want to) breastfeed,” with no strings attached. The argument marshaled against this approach, of course, is that breast milk is better health-wise, as shown by data in numerous studies. We aren’t arguing that point. But the question is: Do the benefits of breastmilk outweigh the risks of obtaining it from strangers on the internet?

And the truth is that in most cases, formula would be fine, even though it seems to be terminally un-hip to say this nowadays in some circles. If you don’t believe us, then look at the OTHER data: a whole lot of adults today (us included) were initially saddled with the terrible handicap of guzzling Similac at a tender age. Yet somehow our generation has managed to rise above these humble circumstances to perform well on our SATs, go on to college and have productive careers.

By all means, if moms want to safely milk-share they should go for it. But we’d hate to think of anybody going to such extremes out of a sense of obligation or peer pressure that ignores the common sense solution.

--Melanie & Kelly