22 May 15 , 2022
a mother’s body and the child’s developmental, nutritional and
immunological needs. The composition of the milk changes
depending on the time of day, over the course of a feeding and over
periods of time. Years of scientific research and medical promo-
tion of breastfeeding have led us to term it “liquid gold.”
But producing milk is also a sizable investment in time and
energy. A nursing woman should consume more calories than a
pregnant one, and nursing a newborn infant can typically take up
to four hours each day in about eight to 12 sessions. It’s real time
and effort that’s not always treated as such because it’s so
intimately connected with societal expectations of women to be
innate nurturers.
“It’s sort of gendered work that women are expected to do
based on altruism. And as a way of being a good woman and a
good mother ... you give up yourself and you give and you keep
giving and you find joy in giving,” says Shannon K. Carter,
co-author of “Sharing Milk: Intimacy, Materiality and Bio-Com-
munities of Practice.”
Medo’s story begins at the intersection of this expectation to
nurture and her own professional ambition. In 1982, three weeks
after the birth of her third child, she returned to her job at the
Vancouver Stock Exchange with a hospital-grade breast pump
that weighed nearly 30 pounds. On her commute, she lugged it in
a cardboard box labeled “breast pump rental,” first on a bus, then a
ferry, finally on a roughly 10-block walk. Even worse, the pump
didn’t effectively remove milk from her breasts, so she started to
lose supply.
Medo grew up in Garden Grove, Calif., the daughter of a
machinist father and homemaker mother. She’d always had an
entrepreneurial streak; in her freshman year at the University of
California at Irvine, she saw a flier on a kiosk for a book called “The
Lazy Man’s Way to Riches” and ordered it. One of the book’s main
messages — that, even if you were working for a boss, you should
try to build something of your own — hit home.
“I remember the example they gave: It doesn’t have to be a cure
for cancer,” she says. “You can buy little hair barrettes and paint
them.”
She went on to sell crocheted purses, hiring classmates to make
them, and earning enough to limit her waitressing hours and
travel during a semester abroad. Medo left college early to start a
family, graduating years later (she would eventually have four
children). But her daily struggle with the breast pump made her
start thinking about how to build a lighter one that could imitate a
baby’s suck to stimulate milk production. In college, she had
briefly been an art minor, and had learned to cast metal and
different polymers. So she developed a flexible funnel to replace
the hard appendage on her pump. Using parts from other medical
products, she produced a pump that was only five pounds. It was
crude-looking, but it worked.
Some of her colleagues at the stock exchange saw her pumping
in the bathroom and asked if they could have one too. She made a
few more to rent out. Eventually, she started providing them
through local home health-care dealers and planned to keep her
pump business as a side job. But a couple of years later, in 1984,
she filled out forms from the Food and Drug Administration to
reach a wider market and developed new models for her company,
which would eventually be called White River Concepts. At its
peak, White River made about $4 million in sales per year, Medo
says.
Not everyone was a fan of her pumps, however. Lactation
consultants at La Leche League International, a nonprofit
breastfeeding advocacy organization, preferred competing onesA
bout a week before Christmas in 2014, Elena Medo
received the opening salvo against her latest breast
milk company. She was at her new office in Lake
Oswego, a suburb of Portland, Ore., when she got a
cease-and-desist letter. Prolacta Bioscience, the
breast milk product company she founded in 1999 and then
parted ways with in 2009, was instructing her new company,
Medolac, to stop using its trade secrets.
Medo, then 61, was used to dealing with adversity. As the
veritable founding mother of the breast milk industry, she had
spent her life charting a controversial path to selling breast milk to
hospitals. Medo had been accused of exploiting women to make
money and of creating inequalities that hurt babies from poor
families. But the products that she’d sold have also been credited
with improving the outcomes for tens of thousands of premature
babies in hospital neonatal intensive care units.
T
he irony of this latest challenge was that it wasn’t coming
from Medo’s traditional detractors, the nonprofit milk
banks. Instead, it was from her former company, which
under the stewardship of a new CEO had sidelined her, she
claimed, and taken an even more commercial tack to profiting from
the sale of breast milk. The timing couldn’t have been worse:
Medolac, which Medo had founded just five years earlier, had
recently gotten its first couple of hospital accounts and was working
on new products.
Medo figured that Prolacta was just trying to scare away the
competition, and she was confident that if her former company
took further legal action, she would be vindicated. Still, the letter
was a damper on holiday celebrations that year. Medolac was a
family enterprise; Medo’s daughter Adrianne Weir managed its
affiliated milk bank, and other relatives performed various compa-
ny roles. The adults tried to put on a happy face for the children, and
they mostly succeeded. But the lawsuit came up enough times that
Medo’s grandchildren began to yell out, “No-lacta!”
Medo didn’t respond to the letter, hoping the issue would just go
away. She had no idea what trade secrets she could have stolen. But
a few weeks later, it was clear that Prolacta was serious. In January
2015, Prolacta filed a lawsuit against Medolac. Rather than being
quickly resolved the legal case has dragged on for more than seven
years; according to Prolacta, the next motions are set for June and
July. In the meantime, Medolac went bankrupt last year, which
Medo says was fallout from the battle.
“Of course the company was losing money when you have a
lawsuit that’s sucking the blood out of the organization,” she told
me, in an exasperated tone.
Medo blames the lawsuit for blocking her from her lifelong
dream: serving sick babies by supplying them with nature’s best
nutrition, breast milk. But her story is more complicated than that.
Medo’s efforts to commodify breast milk raise numerous interest-
ing questions about how we value the work of women, both as
providers of income and unpaid caregivers. Even the terminology
of her trade — “human milk products” or “therapeutics” is how both
Prolacta and Medolac refer to what they sell — hints at the uneasy
relationship between women’s bodily labor and commerce. Medo’s
vacillation between moneymaking and altruism has profoundly
shaped this new industry. It also reflects a struggle at the heart of
being a woman today.
B
reast milk is revered as the ideal food for newborns and a
sign of motherly nurture. It’s one of the first forms of
communication between a mother and her child, betweenphoto: Amanda Lopez