Mary Rose's gracious and interesting letter to Anna has me thinking about how
it is most appropriate for us to think about donor milk.
I was really struck by her emphasis on it as a *treatment,* rather than as
nutrition. This stuff is going to compromised babies or to others who have
some specific *medical* need for it. You get it by prescription.
Now, I have been assiduously training myself (spurred mostly by the cheerful
pugnacity of our own carol brussel) to think that in a perfect world ANY baby
who wasn't getting her own mom's best, either warm from the tap or refrozen,
for whatever reason would get the WHO #3 standard -- that is, donor human
milk. That implies that, say, adopted kids (pace relactation etc) should
in some sense "really" be getting donor milk as their full-time nutrition up
to 6 mos, with gradually decreasing quantities of it up through two or three
or four years of age, just like every other kid. Not so?
And yet Mary Rose's points about disease, persuasion of medical
establishment, etc, are all extremely valid, or at least they sure sound that
way off the top of my head.
Is this just "real world versus ideal world"? Or are we gradually moving to
a different philosophy of milk banking and infant nutrition? Or what? If
any of you who have spent so much time thinking about the milk banks you work
with (Barbara? Carol? Darlene? Nancy?) could share your thoughts I think
it would be valuable.
I live in New York City, a metropolis with no milk bank, for shame. So I
take every opportunity to goad my pediatricians, midwives, neos, etc about
this topic. And if I can do that a little more intelligently, it would
probably be better for the world.
Thanks --
Elisheva Urbas
slowly acquiring bf wisdom, but not credentials of any kind, in New York
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