12 Towards Social Maternity: Where’s the Mother? ... 307reasons for donating, and were far from insistent in his taking their milk
if he was in doubt. In almost every case, MacDonald pasteurised the
milk before feeding Jacob.
Personal donation, then, might minimise the harm of informal milk
sharing. If guidelines were sufficient to establish informed consent, this
would be preferable to the sale of milk outside the milk banking sector,
which can provide its own rigorous screening and management. This is
not dissimilar to Fentiman’s proposal for ‘a regulated market that would
exist alongside the current donative market’ ( 2012 : 176). At the same
time, by acknowledging that informal milk sharing exists, health profes-
sionals could feel free to provide information to safeguard the practice
(Gribble 2014a).
Lissa Skitolsky argues that the combination of the widespread
knowledge of breastmilk’s value, together with the sometimes insur-
mountable difficulties for some women to successfully breastfeed to
six months or beyond—while working, for example, or due to health
problems—means that ‘we need to conceptually separate the transmis-
sion of breast milk from the act of breastfeeding’ ( 2012 : 77). Skitolsky
argues that a key deficiency of the breastfeeding advocacy movement
has been this conflation of breastfeeding with breastmilk, which insists
that the mother producing the milk and providing it via her breast,
or as expressed milk, is the only normative option. She writes that, ‘I
regard breastfeeding as one kind of delivery system for breast milk and,
in agreement with biomedical discourses, view this milk as a precious
commodity to which all should have access’ ( 2012 : 67).
Not only do we have a moral responsibility to assist mothers who
experience pain and other difficulties while nursing, and to provide par-
ents with alternative means to supply breastmilk to their children, but
women’s labour and bodily products ought also to be valued equally
with the other bodily tissues that have been monetised (Swanson 2014 ,
Carroll 2015 ). These need not be mutually exclusive objectives. As Kara
Swanson argues in her ground-breaking history, Banking on the Body
( 2014 ), moving away from the ‘gift/commodity dichotomy’ would ena-
ble us to recognize both the benevolence and the economic benefit of
sharing or exchanging bodily tissues ( 2014 : 9). That the economic value
of breastmilk can be counted as part of the GDP while simultaneously