A freezer full of breastmilk

Gingerly experimenting with the ‘suction’ and ‘speed’ dials, I learned to use it deftly, pumping in the middle of the night and twice a day, between breastfeeding my daughter. The more I pumped, the more my breasts produced. Soon I had an oversupply and a freezer full of earnestly marked little sachets (“150ml, 15th February 6pm”), which my baby would never consume.

In the seamless nights and days following the birth, I measured reality in grams and millilitres, obsessed by my baby’s weight and my own milk production as a reflection of my ability to feed her. My self-worth fluctuated accordingly: if she gained 30 g I was ecstatic, while a loss of 10 g reduced me to tears. Raging hormones were largely to blame, but in hindsight, I was grappling with a novel problem: how to measure my performance as a mother.

Slowly, I adjusted to the responsibility of keeping my new baby alive with desexualised yet enormous breasts. She grew. I relaxed. But I continued to pump.

Weeks later, back in the UK with another full freezer, I started researching how to donate my stores to premature babies and, in doing so, stumbled across the commercial breastmilk market. I discovered that it’s far easier to sell breastmilk to strangers on the internet than to go through the rigorous screenings required by a hospital milk bank.

I trawled online breastmilk marketplaces and soon uncovered a world of health zealotry and wellness buzz, genuine need, and bizarre sexual demands. At the same time, I read academic articles about the historic practices of wet-nursing (breastfeeding another person’s baby for payment) and cross-feeding (breastfeeding another person’s baby for free).

I imagined how it would feel to breastfeed a stranger’s child, or to give my own to be fed by – and bond with – another woman. With or without money changing hands, it seemed unthinkable, yet I knew countless women had done it.

Millennia of mixed messages

While breasts have long been worshipped as symbols of fertility and erotic desire, they have always had a vital function – and a price. The first infant formula was patented in 1865, and human-milk substitutes date back further, but, in general, babies have always depended on breastmilk to survive. For millennia, women have monetised their milk: the ancient practice of wet-nursing remained widespread until the end of the 19th century, while today breastmilk is widely bought and sold online.

Breasts are difficult to view in a neutral way, even when they’re performing a biological function. The virgin breasts of the Madonna in Renaissance paintings, for example, are first and foremost holy symbols, literally serving God.

Exposed breasts today, whether in art or more humdrum settings – including online breastmilk marketplaces – seem to be overwhelmingly sexualised. Prudish attitudes linger around breastfeeding, and it’s not uncommon to be asked to move or cover up in public places. It happened to a close friend of mine as recently as 2021, while other notorious incidents have been reported in the press.

At the same time, women who have failed to breastfeed, or chosen not to, have long been criticised. A famously violent rejection of breastfeeding is expressed by Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, who prays to unseen spirits to “unsex me here… Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall” (‘Macbeth’, Act 1, Scene 5). Her later soliloquy conjures up an image far more gruesome than any murder Macbeth commits, because it violates our expectations of maternal instinct:

History is rife with mixed messages about breastfeeding’s practical desirability. For centuries, wealthy women gave their babies to wet nurses, largely because of social convention, and wet nurses in turn gave up feeding their own babies to feed those of wealthier women.

Today many women do not breastfeed – for some it’s a choice, for others breastfeeding simply isn’t an option. When I was pregnant, I remember feeling conflicted about the “breast is best” slogan that dates from the 1970s – while I wanted to breastfeed, I could see why the slogan is viewed as socially regressive, especially for those who choose or need to return to work soon after birth, or who struggle to breastfeed, for whatever reason.

As I began to research the commercial breastmilk market, I realised it could be viewed in two very different ways: a lucrative opportunity for nursing mothers to help other parents and carers in need, and a problematic industry where both buyers and sellers were vulnerable to exploitation.

Meanwhile, my freezer was filling up with unused breastmilk. I needed to figure out what to do with it.