26 May 15 , 2022
Breastfeeding advocacy groups attacked Medolac’s message as
being patronizing and insensitive to Black women. They criticized
Medolac products’ high cost for hospitals and wrote about the
importance of feeding Detroit’s own children. Facebook and
Instagram posts used the hashtag #StopMedolac. “A lot of people
were outraged that she was targeting this specific population,
with high infant mortality rates and all sorts of social issues, to try
to take milk out of their community,” says Summer Kelly,
president-elect of the Human Milk Banking Association of North
America. “I think it’s obvious how problematic that is.”
Though Medo’s approach in Detroit angered the community,
some scholars, such as Linda Fentiman, an emeritus law professor
at Pace University, also advocated paying milk providers. As
Fentiman noted in a journal article, breast milk was already being
commodified, so it was only fair that the women who provided it
should also benefit, and it would give them a way to earn money
without having to leave their baby. “To me, the question really is:
Is $1 an ounce enough?” she told me recently.
Medolac continued its existing payment system, but in
January 2015 Prolacta filed suit, arguing Medo stole important
customer lists. Because of the costs of the company’s litigation
with Prolacta, Medo posted a message on Medolac’s website,
saying that payments to suppliers would be delayed. Critics from
many of the same organizations that questioned her paid
donation model now criticized her for withholding payment to
those it was promised to.
Medolac eventually made it into about 85 hospitals and was
earning nearly $2 million a year in sales, according to court
documents, but the allegations from Prolacta continued to
mount. The company said that Medo had co-opted standard
operating procedures that Prolacta had spent years perfecting,
but Medo argues that much of the information Prolacta considers
proprietary is well known in the industry.
Unable to raise the necessary operating capital while paying
legal fees that, according to Medo’s attorney, Joseph Bakhos,
would eventually reach at least $5 million, the company began
falling behind with vendors. Many of them sued, and it was hard
to raise more money. In March 2021, Medolac filed for bankrupt-
cy. Because it couldn’t pay employees to manage its freezer,
ounces and ounces of breast milk spoiled, enough for 5,000 feeds,
according to her daughter Adrienne.
“Absolutely heartbreaking,” Medo says tearfully about the
episode. “I can’t even talk about it.”
Chris Kroes, another of Prolacta’s attorneys, argues that
Medolac was never a viable company to begin with and the lawsuit
wasn’t the reason for these financial problems. “Elena Medo and
[her daughter] constantly attempt to present themselves as
victims who are being pushed around by a bigger company. ... The
facts demonstrate the opposite,” he wrote me.
Prolacta, meanwhile, sued another new breast milk product
company, Ni-Q, for patent infringement; the case was dismissed.
Ni-Q later filed suit, asking a court to hold Prolacta’s patent
invalid, which the judge agreed to do. Ni-Q added an antitrust
claim, saying the company used a fraudulent patent to maintain a
monopoly over the breast milk industry. An Oregon judge gave
the claim a green light, but Ni-Q did not pursue it. (Prolacta
maintains it was a baseless claim.)
Prolacta seems “to have been quite tenacious in going after
different companies,” says Carolyn Prouse, a Queen’s University
geographer and political economist. “These are really important
precedent-setting kinds of cases: What do we do with human milk
and this kind of tissue? How do we regulate it, and how do we
regulate patents around it?”
As the leadership of Prolacta and Medolac await trial, other
players have shown up at the scene, including international,
for-profit breast milk companies that are raising new ethical
questions such as whether women in developing countries should
be allowed to sell their milk to American women. Prolacta
recently announced that it had begun a clinical trial in Japan, a
precursor to introducing its fortifier to hospitals there.
In this country, where federal law did not require employers to
give workers unpaid breaks to pump until 2010, lactation
advocates and other stakeholders have been pushing for more
government support for breastfeeding. Tellingly, however, prog-
ress on social and legal protections for nursing women has been
slow. In the meantime, profitable new milk products have
emerged in a largely unregulated market. “Donor human milk is
great when babies don’t have milk,” says Mathilde Cohen, a
professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. “But the
fundamental problem in our culture is that most people don’t
even have the ability to provide milk for their own baby because of
how messed up the system is.”A
s Medo, 68, sees it, the woman without whom commercial
milk banking wouldn’t exist has been edged out of it, at
least for now. But she is still committed to finding a way
back in the game. Prolacta, she says, feeds only a minority of
babies in NICUs, which means there’s a large market, and more
competition is needed to drive down prices. Currently, she is
raising money to pay back the milk suppliers and explore new
options for reopening the milk co-op.
She’s had time to think about what the best model is and has
concluded that it wouldn’t be possible to create products like hers
at a nonprofit because of the quantity of investment needed. On
the other hand, a for-profit model involves high salaries and other
limitations that mean not all of the money goes to babies. A
for-profit model could work, she’s convinced, if it has the right
stewardship with a clear mission of social responsibility.
In many ways, the challenges she has faced in her business are
the same as those faced by many women: trying to make the best
of a market economy while being expected to give freely of their
emotional and bodily labor when the system isn’t built to value it.
Modern motherhood, with its expectation of endless unpaid
giving, is nearly impossible to balance with the bottom-line-driv-
en culture of the American workplace. Women often end up in the
uncomfortable position of delaying professional advancement —
and losing out to men — or relying on less-privileged women to
fulfill caretaking needs.
Medo sees herself as someone trying to do good. Her aim, she
told me again and again, is to serve babies by stepping up to meet
a growing demand for breast milk. And yet, as her critics have
repeatedly asked: Does capitalizing on other women’s labor
distort that aim and increase the chance for exploitation? Medo
doesn’t deny the danger, but she blames the system, not herself,
for the difficulty navigating the competing demands of altruism
and the marketplace.
“I guess it’s more of an issue with capitalism than anything
else,” she says.Sushma Subramanian is a journalism professor at the University of
Mary Washington and the author of “How to Feel: The Science and
Meaning of Touch.” This article was produced as part of the Knight
Science Journalism Fellowship Program at MIT. Carly Stern assisted
with fact-checking.