12 Towards Social Maternity: Where’s the Mother? ... 295social marketing promotes behaviour change as economically beneficial,
through savings to both individuals’ and states’ health budgets.
The commodification of human milk is nothing new. Practised
since antiquity, wet-nursing became a well-established form of labour
from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, with the widespread paid
employment of wet nurses by middle-class and aristocratic parents.
Payment to women for expressed milk provided to milk banks was also
a respectable means for women to earn an income from the late nine-
teenth century until as late as 1961, when the last milk bank paying
women for their milk closed in Boston (Golden 2001 ; Swanson 2014 ;
Wolf 1999 ). The bioethical underside of this economy was the finan-
cial incentive for women to neglect or abandon their own children in
order to earn money from feeding the offspring of wealthy employers,
particularly in France during the eighteenth century. During slavery in
the USA, black American mothers were also forced without payment to
feed their white owners’ children at the expense of their own, at times
resulting in the death of their offspring (Golden 2001 ). As with many
other forms of labour, exploitation through underpayment or coer-
cion was a real danger. ‘Theories of “lactational heredity”’ to determine
the ‘good character’ of wet nurses, based on a theory that personality
traits such as temperament, appearance, class, or race could be trans-
mitted through nursing, reinforced discriminatory beliefs about the vir-
tues, vices, weaknesses, and strengths of breastfeeding women (Harrison
2016 : 99; Wolf 1999 ).^4
After the decline of breastfeeding in the West during the twentieth
century, and the closure of most milk banks as demand for human milk
fell, cultural memory regarding the ease and relative safety with which
human milk might be shared has faded. Additionally, the HIV/AIDS
and hepatitis C epidemics of the 1980s resulted in the closure of the
few hospital-based milk banks that had continued to operate in this
decade. In 1985 HMBANA was established in order to restore the sup-
ply for premature and sick infants in intensive care wards, though there
was still scepticism regarding its therapeutic importance into the 2000s,
even among neonatologists (Giles 2003 ). It is still FDA policy to dis-
approve of human milk sharing on safety grounds, although La Leche
League (LLL) leaders are now permitted to provide information and