Like many women, when journalist Alev Scott had her first baby, she saw her body in a new way. Scott, who lives in Somerset, was breastfeeding her baby, and had more milk than she needed – and when she started looking into what other women did with theirs, she was intrigued.
“Before I became a mother, I honestly never thought about the ethics of a woman’s body before, during and after pregnancy,” she says. “But I had this excess breast milk that I was trying to donate and discovered this commercial market online. It really made me ask myself, ‘How do I personally feel about the concept of selling my milk, or about other women selling theirs?’”
Women in Britain can donate breast milk to hospital milk banks, but as Scott found, it can be a lengthy and rigorous process – there are several screenings needed and the banks themselves do not have a huge amount of resources, meaning not all milk offered is accepted. So selling her milk emerged as a far more speedy – and lucrative – option.
Her extraordinary experience is documented in her new book, Cash Cow: How the Maternal Body Became a Global Commodity – and the Hidden Costs for Women.
For the purposes of the book, Scott posed as a seller on the website OnlyTheBreast.com – a US and UK site that is branded as “a community for moms to buy, sell and donate natural breast milk”. From there she could investigate the ethics of buying, selling and donating human milk and the way that these markets operate. “There’s this very unique position that breast milk holds, certainly in the UK and US” she explains. “It’s a bodily fluid that is legal to sell because it’s classed as a food.”
While neither the Food Standards Authority (FSA) in the UK or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US endorse the sale of breast milk, it is an unregulated market, with one litre going for between £30 and £50. Prices depend on everything from freshness, to the woman’s diet, to her age. She found buyers included parents who don’t qualify for donated milk, but says “the majority of customers for breast milk are men… I did not expect that”.
Breast milk is big in the wellness industry. “The colostrum that women produce in the first days postpartum, as well as the later milk itself,” she writes “is often touted as ‘liquid gold’ – not just for babies but for adults convinced that its elixir-like properties extend beyond infancy. Bodybuilders buy colostrum and breast milk, as do cancer survivors, and those who suffer from digestive complaints like IBS.” There is no significant evidence to show that breast milk has any benefits for adults.
However, when Scott listed her own milk for sale, she was even more surprised to discover that a majority of the men buying it were doing so because it turns them on: either the breast milk itself, or the bodies of breastfeeding mothers. And there were also sellers leaning into this – the listings on OnlyTheBreast.com with pictures of faces and cleavage, and descriptions emphasising sellers’ (young) age, received far more interest she says. Until 2022, there were categories called “Willing to Sell to Men” among sellers and “Men seeking breast milk” among buyers, though after Scott contacted the site these categories disappeared. Male buyers still flourish but with willingness to sell to men now being folded more subtly into listings.
Scott’s own listing was carefully clinical, and as asexual as she could make it. And yet, she writes, “of the many requests I received within hours of posting the ad, all but one were from men, and most were overtly sexual.” She was asked to wet nurse, or provide videos of her hand expressing milk. Others requested the same but with an electric pump. There were men who were explicit about their erotic fixation, and others who pretended it was for body building, before admitting it was also a turn on.
“I was troubled on some level, and I still am, particularly when I think of it in the light of exploitative online porn and how men’s sexual appetites and demands can seemingly insert themselves into the most inappropriate and unexpected of contexts. But I also recognise that if sex work is legal in the real world, so should selling breast milk to horny men.” She points out that an oversupply of milk is not an uncommon experience for new mothers: “With a genuine excess of milk, this is about women’s freedom to do what they want with their bodies. I think we expect more altruism of women than we do of men – not everyone is prepared to donate for free.”
Scott had no intention of actually selling her milk – but she did give some to one man in exchange for him talking to her about why he buys it. Steve was a 60-year-old, distressed, lorry driver who suffered from crippling irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and claimed breast milk was the only thing that alleviated his symptoms.
He told her that he discovered this several years ago, through his ex who had just had a baby and told him to try her milk. The exchange made her extremely uneasy.
“I was becoming increasingly convinced that IBS was an excuse for a lonely man to get himself some emotional nourishment,” she writes. When she gave him her frozen milk she said that it made her unexpectedly sentimental. “I felt like crying. I was giving away my child’s milk, my life force.”
The breast milk industry brings up existential and emotive questions about our bodies and their products: who decides what we can and can’t do with them?
Scott thinks that part of this comes down to the tension between a mother as an individual, vs a part of a wider community.
Wet nursing and milk kinship has a long history, and Scott argues that our squeamishness about it reflects our modern, more individualistic approach to parenting.
She tells how, when a friend of hers was struggling to produce enough milk for her child, she offered to give her some of hers. Her friend, rather than being repulsed, willingly accepted: her priority was her baby’s health. This, Scott learned, made the two children “milk siblings” – a form of kinship that fosters allegiance between community members, in several religious traditions. Scott felt her own sense of pride in supporting her friend and baby – but says “the proverbial village that raises the child is one you must choose, organise and finance yourself. Living in such a close-knit community that you could casually offer to breastfeed your neighbour’s baby, or vice versa, seems unthinkable in my own community.”
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But with a culture of sharing come wider questions about who benefits, especially when the milk is not donated but sold and bought. Is it empowerment or exploitation?
There are arguments for both. Scott met an American woman who sees producing milk as a second job, one that she can do at a time of life when women are largely excluded from the workforce. But there are also cases of explicit exploitation, such as the company Ambrosia Labs in Utah, US, who recruited impoverished Cambodian women as milk donors – in 2017, the Cambodian government banned the export of breast milk after campaigning from UNICEF and other groups.
She says there is an urgent need for people to reckon with these questions. “Generally, governments seem to either turn a blind eye to the breastmilk market or ban it altogether.
“Everyone needs to consider this as a collective because otherwise, the change that we need is not going to happen given how fast the industry is growing.”
Cash Cow by Alev Scott, published by HarperCollins UK, is out now
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