All over the UK press is controversy over a picture of TV personality Kate Garraway. Is she nude? Actually a 15-year-old made to look sexy by Annie Leibovitz? A clip of a sex video with a rock star boyfriend?
Nope, in this picture, she is shown breastfeeding a Jersey calf. Yep, a woman is BFing a cow.
This picture (actually a simulated breastfeeding) is to promote Ms. Garraway's documentary where she travels to the U.S. and examines "cross-nursing," where women breastfeed other people's children.
The pic is also used to examine our beliefs about nature: does it make sense for Garraway to give human milk to a calf any more than it makes sense to give cow's milk to your baby?
To many this might seem weird, but they (the series of pictures) challenge us that it's actually much weirder to give our babies cows' milk than it is to drink milk from another woman.
In Other People's Milk, the UK's GMTV presenter spoke with various women on milk sharing: those who cross-nursed, surrogates who donate breastmilk, and one working mama who hired another woman to breastfeed while she works. Garraway admits that she went into the documentary with prejudices:
'Why are they doing it? Is it because it’s easier than breastfeeding themselves?' They said, 'No, we’re doing it totally in the interests of the child, and we’re prepared to sacrifice our ego over having that role.'
It seems the documentary even helped Garraway come to terms with her own mama ego, she said in a Guardian interview. She discussed with the subjects her emotions when she got home to her own daughter and consoled her with the breast, that Oh, Mama's here! No one else can give you what I can! feeling we're all familiar with. The nursers pointed out to her,
What you’re thinking about is your role as a mother, you’re not thinking about the child at all.'Making the film also showed her that these women are sharing their breastmilk for entirely unselfish reasons: for the good of the child. Garraway is now a convert. Where before she said she couldn't imagine someone else breastfeeding her daughter, she now says that if she had another child and could not breastfeed, she would get milk from a bank.
Miss Garraway said: ‘I came away from this documentary just in wonderment at the female body. But because of the sexualisation of breasts, we don't see them as the clever, brilliant things they are. Not in the way that we see the brain or the heart. Just how clever the breast is. ...It's just an incredible thing that we take for granted.
I've written before about milk donation. And milk banks are expensive: $3/ounce for that liquid gold! Perhaps a UK celeb can afford it, but many families, especially those who are facing illness, simply cannot budget breastmilk when mamas cannot do it themselves. They turn to MilkShare, where generous donors help them out.
La Leche League fully supports the use of human milk for babies. They do point out, however, that it is rare that a woman can't breastfeed. Some estimates, like that of Unicef, claim that only 1 percent of women cannot breastfeed for medical reasons.
We can all breastfeed. And because of the wealth of benefits, both to mama and baby, we all should. We're healthy, natural women, and we have that luxury.
If we could not, would it make sense to give milk from another species?
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