Nikki asked the following, with respect to that news report from Esther about the attempt to “improve” infant immune systems:
<< Bring back the wet nurse!! If women can rent out their wombs, and sell their eggs, why can't the wet nurse become an honored profession?>>
To which I sadly speculate: because the return of wet nursing isn't sufficiently technological. What happens between a woman and a nursing infant is utterly personal, utterly human, and delightfully messy and unpredictable - whether or not the woman in question is the child's mother.
Granted that renting out one's womb can't help but to also be personal, human, and messy but for that same reason IMO it's not going to turn into an actual profession, the way wet nursing once was. And it still involves a fair amount of technological intervention, which makes it somehow more palatable to our perverse modern mindset.
(Side note: childbirth in the U.S. currently suffers from the same philosophical problem. C-sections are so much more technological, predictable and artificial than a vaginal birth. That is viewed as a GOOD thing. Beneath the surface of our cultural consciousness, we TRUST that which we can control and predict. Like C-sections and formula. The converse is also true: we don't trust that which refuses to submit itself to our control, like natural birth and breastfeeding.)
I have long thought that wet nursing would make a comeback in the United States some day but as time passes I'm less and less sure of that. Our "modern" mindset is much more comfortable with turning breastmilk into a commodity and the process of breastfeeding into a medical-technical process, surrounded and "supported" by machines and inventions the way a skeleton surrounds and supports sinew and muscle.
It gives me no joy to say that but, on my cynical days at least, that is how I feel.
Wet nursing and the history of infant feeding have long fascinated me because I will never cease to wonder how we, a mammalian species, got so far away from behaving like the mammals that we are. What other mammalian species puts as much effort into NOT nursing as we do? None.
:::sigh:::
Just my opinion, of course....my view of the world from South Florida, where the C-section rate is OVER 50% and VBACS are practically non-existent.....
Regina Maria Roig-Romero, BS, IBCLC, RLC
Sr. Lactation Consultant
Miami-Dade County Health Dept WIC/Nutrition
Breastfeeding Program
● 7785 NW 48 Street Suite 300 ● Miami, Florida 33166 ● Phone: (786) 336-1333 x16219 ● Breastfeeding Helpline: (786) 336-1336 ● Fax (786) 336-1302
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