Bioethics Beyond Altruism Donating and Transforming Human Biological Materials

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for safe practice and informed consent. At the same time, the pricing of
milk within the regulated market, whose primary consumers are parents
of premature or sick infants, ‘may even convey the social value of breast-
milk’ more generally (Shaw 2010 : 92), resulting in increased socio-eco-
nomic support for breastfeeding mothers.
The large profits made by Prolacta and Medolac, and potentially
other businesses as more emerge, as well as the moral imperative to rec-
ognise the labour of women and the contribution of their milk to the
GDP, makes it clear that it is unjust not to remunerate women who
supply milk to people outside their immediate family. As Bromberg
Bar Yam notes, it is ‘untenable’ that ‘non-profit milk banks cannot pay
donors [while] for profit companies must pay donors’ ( 2010 : 108). At
the same time, the rise of the sharing economy and the dissemination of
safe methods to express, store, and distribute human milk within com-
munities means that a culture of milk sharing is also viable, and may
be the preference of a significant population of women with milk to
spare.^13 As those who donated to MacDonald made clear, sharing is an
important source of social capital building, in addition to helping oth-
ers, reducing waste, and providing the pleasure of making the most of
the lactating period of parents’ lives beyond feeding their own children.
For MacDonald, the quest for the ideal of ‘exclusive breastfeed-
ing’ became a rewarding and more realistic experience that might bet-
ter be understood as ‘inclusive breastfeeding’, to borrow a term from
Aran Tavakoli’s mothering blog, ‘Sanity Spot’. Faced with the choice
described by Skitolsky, between her own breastmilk and infant formula,
Tavakoli writes that although ‘I do exclusively give my baby all the
breast milk I have ... I wish there was a different word for how I feed
my baby. A word that matches the pride of the mamas who do exclu-
sively breastfeed their little ones all they produce’. Noting that the term
exclusive means ‘not shared’, she opts for inclusive instead, since ‘Saying
that “I inclusively breastfeed” is so much more positive and empower-
ing than saying, “I have low supply and need to supplement.” My lacta-
tion consultant, Ashley, always said to me, “He is getting your milk...”
He’s getting my milk, the amount doesn’t matter, and he is getting my
milk’. Inclusive breastfeeding, she continues, means ‘open to everyone:
not limited to certain people’ (Tavakoli 2014 ).


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