13 Bio-Intimate Economies of Breastmilk ... 325donor screening, safe handling, and home pasteurisation (Walker and
Armstrong 2012 ). Moreover, these women distinguish online peer-milk
sharing from milk that is informally sold over the Internet in terms of
the trustworthiness of donor. Their view is that if the donor is prepared
to give breastmilk to their own baby, then it is safe to give to a stranger.
Undergirding these accounts is an assumption that the altruis-
tic donor has taken the requisite safety precautions to ensure hygienic
standards when pumping, handling, storing, and distributing her milk.
The non-contamination and quality of the donor’s breastmilk is thus
assured by the donor’s good intentions. Where money changes hands,
however, the donor’s motives are considered to be questionable—
a view Kroløkke and Petersen ( 2017 ) note in relation to the debates
against commercial surrogate pregnancy. Once the transaction is com-
pleted, the remunerated donor’s obligation to the recipient is annulled.
Contrastingly, as Gribble ( 2013 ) points out in her study, online altruis-
tic donors do not want their gift to be entirely forgotten. Instead, they
want recipients to appreciate the value of their donated breastmilk as a
sacrifice of their time, labour, and effort. As a display of maternal affect
and care, the donors Gribble surveyed in her study construct the gift of
breastmilk as ‘a part of the donor’s self ’ ( 2013 :458). Peer-milk sharing
thus conforms to a soft version of altruism as relational or reciprocal
gifting (Shaw 2017 ).
It bears noting that even before publication of the Keim et al. study,
Gribble and Hausman ( 2012 ) argued that the risks of informal peer-
milk sharing were exaggerated. They suggested that the warning against
peer-milk sharing stems from a ‘yuk factor’ (Shaw 2004 ), reflecting cul-
tural distaste around sharing intimate bodily parts and the potential for
pollution or contamination when exchanging bodily fluids with stran-
gers about whom little or nothing is known. Although there are health
risks associated with intercorporeal activity of any kind, the concerns
raised by breastmilk sharing detractors are value-laden, based on cul-
tural ideas about what should be shared between differently embodied
subjects. The moral regulation and safety of breastmilk donation is of
particular concern to healthcare professionals charged with managing its
‘paradoxical’ status in the NICU, as Carol Bartle ( 2010 ) observes. It is
to this part of the discussion that we now turn.