Nina In New York: Lactating For Fun And Profit (Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be)

A lighthearted look at news, events, culture and everyday life in New York. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
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By Nina Pajak

According to a new study in the journal Parenting, online sites that help parents buy and sell breastmilk are proliferating—like this one, and this one, and this one—and they aren't always on the up and up.

In what might be the least sexy secret mission in the history of secret missions, researchers bought a slew of samples from some of these websites and tested them to see whether they were 100% human. And lo and behold, 11 out of 102 contained nonhuman milk. FROM ALIENS! No just kidding, it was from cows. Well, I never. If I wanted to buy some cow's milk, I could do it for a whole lot less at the store around the corner. It's great in coffee and cereal, I highly recommend it to anyone, except for infants under a year for whom it's potentially pretty damaging. Oh yeah, that.

This whole story gives me the icks. The presence of cow's milk of unknown provenance would seem to indicate that the source of the human milk is similarly unreliable. And I think we all know that a person can get into a whole lot more trouble than a cow can. Is formula really so bad that people would rather feed their kids breastmilk provided by an unknown person and sourced through a potentially dishonest third party? To whit: a couple of years ago, milk sold through one site was largely found to be contaminated by bacteria.

I get it, to some extent. The pressure to breastfeed our infants is immense, both from the medical community and much more so from The Moms. It is, after all, what nature intended. But it isn't nearly the natural process you'd expect, and for many women, for a multitude of reasons, it's just not possible. That can be incredibly painful for a new mom who is desperate to do everything right for her baby. But can we chill, just a touch, on the formula thing? Breast might be best, but the message has become a bit more fascistic than simply passionate. I'm pretty sure when my generation was young, our mothers lovingly placed us in our death-trap cribs filled with blankets and stuffed animals and happily gave us our bottles of formula without looking behind their backs to see if the gestapo was coming. Nor did they spend too much time worrying if we would wind up with deficient gut flora and being terrible at calculus. We're okay. We love our moms the same amount we always would have. Our seasonal allergies and various physical and cognitive deficiencies probably can't be blamed entirely on the Enfamil. Let's all take a deep breath and give ourselves a break.

On the other side of the nipple, I mean nickel, I mean coin, there are few experiences as devastating as having to throw away breast milk that you've devoted hours to pumping. You are stuck in a chair for half the day, hunched over, literally milking yourself like some poor, industrial dairy cow. Every drop is precious and hard won. You eat baked treats engineered to increase milk production. You drink gallons of water. When you're not pumping, you're cleaning the many, obnoxiously tiny pump parts. You store the bags of milk in the freezer like an extremely organized, clinically obsessive hoarder, and when the day comes that your child weans before having exhausted your supply, you weep.

Here's the good news: there are infants in this world who could truly benefit from donated breastmilk, and there are official milk banks with high standards for donation and rigorous testing and pasteurizing policies. So if you want to get rid of some excess "liquid gold," do it at one of those. For free. I think that as soon as you commodify something, people will start to cut corners to increase profits. Perhaps breastmilk was never destined for your grocer's freezer. Sorry, but that's the way the lactation cookie crumbles.

Nina Pajak is a writer living with her husband, daughter and dog in Queens. Connect with Nina on Twitter!