To me the notable thing about this story is the price that she got for
selling her milk to the milk bank: almost US$20 per liter. The issue of
placing a value on human milk is a tough one. When Solveig Francis and I
researched the topic for "The Milk of Human Kindness," we found values
that had been assigned to human milk ranging from US$0.27 a liter to
US$600.00 a liter.

Twenty-seven cents a liter was what a woman in Nepal would pay for cows'
milk from a dairy to replace her own milk if she did not breastfeed.

Fifty cents per liter was the value given in order to estimate the value
of human milk produced in the nation of Indonesia...and even at that low
rate, the value of human milk was larger than the national health
budget, larger than the national production of tin and coffee, and
approached the value of rubber.

One dollar per liter was the value assigned to milk in the Hatloy &
Olshaug article from JHL, in which it was estimated that counting human
milk production in Mali would raise the the GDP by 5%.

$600 a liter was the price one Danish hospital charged another hospital
from outside the country ($18.20 an ounce). This was reported in JHL.
Presumably, whoever set that price thought that other hospitals jolly
well ought to collect their own milk, and if they wouldn't take the
trouble, then they'd have to pay the Big Bucks.

US milk banks charge around $3.00 an ounce now, which is close to $100 a
liter, and the donors are not paid. Meanwhile, (Rachel, correct me if
I'm out of date) my understanding is that the price to purchase banked
milk in Norway is about $48 a liter...and half of that price goes to pay
the woman who supplied the milk! Remember that Norway is the only
country that includes human milk production on its national economic
balance sheet. In other words, Norway is the only country where human
milk is formally recognized as having an economic value. Gee, do you
suppose this fact is related to the fact that Norway has the best
breastfeeding rates in the developed world?

Looking over these figures, do we think that that $20 a liter looks like
a fair price for the producer? And do we think that making milk for
one's own child should have a different "value" than making milk for
other people's children? I once calculated (conservatively) that I had
produced a ton of milk over the course of long-term nursing two
children. Do I think that experience was in any sense "worth" $20,000?
Of course, the experience was beyond price...

I guess the intellectual exercise of assigning a value to something
priceless is just a tool to help us examine what we think about this
basic part of human life...human biology...women's role in
reproduction...women's economic life. Assigning a monetary value gives
us one way to compare apples and oranges.

Musing in Swarthmore...
Chris

Chris Mulford, RN, IBCLC
LLL Leader Reserve
working for WIC in South Jersey (Eastern USA)
Co-coordinator, Women & Work Task Force, WABA

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