Really Pants

Milk donation and the plight of Haitian babies.

Milk donation is something I feel very passionately about. After my gorgeous daughter was born she spent the first 24 hours of her life in neonatal intensive care for observations, while traumatic for any new mother to see her tiny baby in an incubator I soon learned that, compared to some mothers, I had it easy. I spent the vast majority of those 24 hours in NICU with my baby and couldn’t help looking around at the other incubators in which lay some of the tiniest babies I have ever seen. It was heartbreaking to behold and I feel a great deal of compassion and respect for the mothers of premature and poorly babies. Read on….

While my daughter was in NICU I breastfed her and found it difficult leaving to sleep as I wouldn’t know if she was hungry or not. I soon realised that, while I was able to stay in hospital with my daughter, mothers of premature babies aren’t given this luxury beyond the first few days/weeks of their baby’s life. Breastfeeding them, then, must be incredibly difficult if not impossible. Anybody who has attempted expressing early on will know it’s difficult, time consuming and in many cases it proves to be fruitless. Expressing is generally only successful once you have been fully lactating for a number of weeks. Before then, your baby is the best way to bring in and maintain your milk supply. It’s no surprise, then, that the majority of premature babies are given formula to survive.

Donating milk is a great way for an established breastfeeder to make a contribution to the lives of many babies and their mothers. Many donate blood, few donate milk.

In recent news, after the devastation caused by the earthquake in Haiti, a call has been put out to breastfeeding mothers to donate milk. Water treatment infrastructures have been damaged making it difficult to impossible for formula to be made safely. Further to that, diseases are on the rise. Donating formula is one option but the Tsunami of 2004 showed that doing this led to a decline in breastfeeding and a threefold rise in diarrhoeal diseases in babies according to the Emergency Nutrition Network.

Unfortunately, only American women are able to donate their milk to Haitian babies at present as they have the transportation conditions necessary at their disposal. But, If anybody is generally interested in milk donation be sure to contact your local milk bank for information via http://www.ukamb.org