The increase in premature and low birth-weight infants surviving the birth trauma and requiring ongoing care has resulted in much concern with infant feeding strategies and an increasing recognition of the growing evidence that when mother’s own milk is not available (a frequent deficiency among mothers of premature babies), donated human milk represents the next best option. Donor human milk demonstrates medicinal as well as nutritional benefits that formula milk cannot provide – most urgently, its immunising properties which are particularly essential if infants are to avoid conditions such as necrotizing enterocolitis – the most significant life-threatening condition affecting premature infants.
Donor milk banking can only function effectively if concerns with transmission are satisfactorily addressed. Fears of milk contamination inhibit the growth development of milk banking. Specifically, anxieties regarding lifestyle choices of donor mothers, particularly with reference to alcohol consumption, may deter hospitals and medical practitioners from recommending the use of donor milk.
Donor human milk, with its immunising properties, has the ability to reduce the amount of time infants spend in Neo-Natal Intensive Care Units, thus saving health authorities money and resources. However, lack of adequate publicity and accurate information concerning milk-banking inhibits the growth of this life-saving (and cost-saving) practice. Indeed a widely reported so-called “Ick Factor” regarding the feeding of babies with other mothers’ milk, indicates a culturally prevalent gut reaction to the practice. For milk-banking to flourish, anxieties regarding both the prevalence and consequences of milk contamination need to be addressed in direct and forthright terms. At the heart of these anxieties is concern over the lifestyles of donor mothers. By researching the detailed life choices of milk donors, a human context can be established which can in turn influence informed policy making regarding future strategies in donor milk banking and milk donor recruitment.
This project was initiated with the objective of researching the human context of relevant stakeholders at four major human milkbanks across the UK and Ireland. This research is to be widely disseminated, both within academic sociological circles and in medical journals. The findings of this research are to be made widely available to the general public.
The research has served the purpose of illustrating the versatility of ways in which milk donation becomes normalised for very different women in very different circumstances By understanding the experiences of how women came to become milk donors, and what the life of a human milk donor consists of, donor recruitment will be focused more sensitively as well as efficiently.
