292 F. Giles
this emerging phenomenon. In considering the practices of informal
human milk exchange, I will draw from Trevor MacDonald’s memoir
of breastfeeding as a transgender father, which demonstrates the capac-
ity of a loose-knit community of Facebookers, friends and neighbours
in Canada to sustain a baby for most of its first year of life, primarily
on donated human milk to supplement MacDonald’s supply. Where’s the
Mother? Stories from a Transgender Dad ( 2016 ) relates how MacDonald
strived exclusively to breastfeed his son, Jacob, for the recommended
first six months, while producing only a small amount of his own
milk, as he had undergone chest surgery prior to planning a family.
MacDonald’s story illustrates many of the challenges of so-called exclu-
sive breastfeeding, as well as the corporeal generosity and openness of a
diverse network of individuals in aiding his objective.
While I explore some of the ethical implications of informal human
milk sharing, the essay also mounts a justification for this practice,
based on a feminist acknowledgement of the value of maternal labour,
together with an ethical defence of ‘embodied philanthropy’ (Robert
2013 ). Drawing from Robyn Lee’s and Lissa Skitolsky’s work in particu-
lar, I explore the idea that humans have a moral responsibility to feed
each other through broadening the concept of the maternal (Lee 2016 ;
Skitolsky 2012 ). At the same time, there is an emerging feminist argu-
ment in support of recognising the value of breastmilk as a commod-
ity, since a market for human milk already exists, and has for most of
human history (Fentiman 2012 ; Golden 2001 ; Swanson 2014 ). I will
conclude that these two approaches—of donation or sharing and the
sale of human milk—need not be mutually exclusive. A regulated mar-
ket, enabling payment to donors (or more accurately human milk pro-
viders or wet nurses) and its sale to parents of children in need, could
coexist with a culture of informal, unremunerated milk sharing based
on informed consent within communities of parents. As the so-called
sharing economy continues to grow across a range of services and prod-
ucts—encouraged by digital technology and the need ‘to maximize
the use of scarce resources’—so too has the sharing of food made by
humans begun to more commonly include breastmilk (Allen and Berg
2014 : 2).^1
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