Page 4505 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 31 October 2018
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Zoe’s baby was losing weight, so her milk needed to be supplemented with formula. She tried every supplement to increase her supply of milk, pumping every three hours for 12 months to get as much as she could. Zoe said she would have loved the option of donor milk in hospital.
While some parents face circumstances affecting lactation and supply, other parents produce more milk than they need for their infant. They want their breastmilk to be used to benefit another family. But at the moment, without a facility, some parents have difficulty doing so and the effects are not insignificant.
One mother is Jordanna. Jordanna’s baby was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit. Luckily, Jordanna had been storing her colostrum throughout her pregnancy and was able to feed her child throughout this period. When Jordanna found herself with more breastmilk than was necessary and wanted to donate the excess supply to other vulnerable babies at the hospital she was not able to, as there are no screening facilities in Canberra. Jordanna threw the leftover colostrum away. She described throwing away the leftover colostrum as devastating.
Another parent is Kat. Kat lost her firstborn son during childbirth. Kat wanted to donate her breastmilk because, as she explained:
I wanted to do something kind within our darkest hours.
Without a milk bank, she was not able to do this.
Amelia would also have liked to honour her beautiful child with a donation. As she said:
It would have been a positive way to acknowledge the existence of my daughter while also helping another baby and family in need.
But she did not get the chance.
Without a formal opportunity, a formal, physical location for donations and receipts to take place, parents across the ACT have been taking things into their own hands. Informal peer-to-peer sharing arrangements exist. Some of these are between friends, some between strangers. Some are facilitated by social media.
One parent shared with me that she was a surrogate for a couple in Sydney and that that couple chose to use formula exclusively to feed their baby. As a result, this surrogate mother had a baby’s worth of milk but no baby, so she informally donated some of this milk to other families. Janelle, the mother of two premature babies, has relied on private donations like this. Janelle has described how scary it is not knowing when and where the next supply of milk is coming from.
Nina’s daughter, Alex, spent four days in the neonatal intensive care unit as well as the special care unit at the Canberra Hospital. Nina expressed milk to feed Alex via tube but could not express enough to meet Alex’s needs. Donor milk through the
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