That’s the surprisingly sudden, fierce debate that's popped up in Detroit, with the city's Black Mothers Breast Feeding Association publishing a list of concerns this week about a breast milk company’s early plans to recruit moms in the city.
First off, yes: you can sell breast milk.
Medolac, the Oregon-based company taking all this heat, will buy it for $1 an ounce and then sell it at $3.57 to hospitals, where it can be life-saving for premature babies.
The company poses it as a win-win-win: it says breast milk is in far greater demand than the current supply can possibly meet, so this way hospitals can help more babies, and moms have extra money for their own kids.
Getting more black women to breast-feed ... by buying their milk at $1 an ounce?
Medolac joined up with the Clinton Global Initiative back in September to roll out a proposal to “increase breast-feeding rates among urban African American women” by getting more of those women to sell their breast milk, with a potential “financial impact … [for] urban African American women over three years is estimated at $6.6 million.”
And that’s what worries Kiddada Green.
"What evidence do they have that they're going to increase breast-feeding rates among black women by paying them for their breast milk?"
“What credible evidence do they have that backs up these claims that they’re going to increase breast-feeding rates among black women by paying them for their breast milk?
If a mother is in a difficult financial position, Green says, "might she not breast-feed her child, but rather use the local free resources to receive free infant formula and sell (all) her milk?”
Green is the founder of the Black Mothers Breast Feeding Association, which she started to tackle the high infant mortality rates in Michigan’s black community.
One way to do that: help more moms breast-feed their children, which can reduce health risks. But Green says only 26% of black women in Michigan are still breast-feeding by the time their babies are six months old.
And she’s worried that Medolac’s Detroit proposal could make things worse.
"Might she not breast-feed her child, but rather use the local free resources to receive free infant formula and sell her milk?"
“Forty years of racial disparities in breast-feeding rates can’t be eliminated by a paycheck. And I really think that that type of thinking is overly simplistic and insulting to black women in this country.
“It reeks of exploitation of vulnerable people. So if your specific target is black, low-income Detroit women, and you’re saying it will create wealth for these people, I’m wondering how you define wealth?” she says.
Medolac says moms can make up to $2,000 a month, letting them stay at home longer
Medolac says its critics are way off base.
“It provides an opportunity for them to choose to breast-feed and choose to stay home longer, or at all, as opposed to returning to work and putting the baby back on formula,” says Adrianne Weir, the CEO of Mother’s Milk Cooperative, which partners with Medolac.
“I developed this program when I was a stay-at-home mom trying to find a way to continue to stay home and continue to nurse my babies. So I know it works, because I’ve worked with more than 1,000 donors who have had success," she says.
"We have women calling us saying, 'I have 14,000 ounces stored in a chest freezer in my garage and I don't know what to do with it.'"
As for how much money women are making, Weir says the average is about $600 a month. If that seems like an awful lot of milk, on top of what your baby already needs, Weir says it’s really not.
“We have donors earning that are $2,000 a month. Milk production is an amazing thing. If you think about how much you need to support twins or triplets, it’s a supply and demand process. A lot of our donors have started out with an abundance of milk and an oversupply. We have women calling us saying, ‘I have 14,ooo ounces stored in a chest freezer in my garage and I don’t know what to do with it.’”
A safer, but less lucrative, alternative to the breast milk black market?
But what about the concern that poor moms might feel like they have to sell all their own breast milk, leaving none for their own kids?
While Weir says you might get one or two moms like that, she believes that’s just not the case for most of the women they work with.
It’s why they won’t take milk from moms whose babies are less than three months old, “so breast feeding can be established first,” and it’s why they pay women for their breast milk 90 days after it’s been sent in, so you can’t use this is a way to “make a quick buck.”
But mostly, Weir believes they’re not exploiting low-income moms because, she says, those women could easily get more money selling their milk on the black market.
"On the Internet, that woman could get paid today by going and meeting behind Kmart or something and get three times the amount of money we offer."
So how will Medolac and its partner, Mothers Milk Cooperative, move forward in Detroit? Right now, they’re not sure.
“That’s the most unfortunate element of this whole thing, that they’ve sort of shot this horse before it got out of the gate,” says Weir.
“Because we’ve been collaborating with partners that would support women and offer them additional resources. Really right now this program is a blob of clay, and we haven’t had a chance before all this pushback started to really even begin the planning process [to recruit women in Detroit.]
“We’re not going to go somewhere we’re not wanted, but that’s not the message we’re receiving from the mothers of Detroit. I’ve had donors from Detroit for two years. They are deeply offended by the messages being put out from these groups."
