Epilogue: From commodity to gift

Summary

Bottled breast milk remains to this day a vital product for a small number of infants. However, it is collected and distributed far differently than it was early in the twentieth century. It is no longer a commodity sold by working-class women, but has become, instead, a gift. And it is given not in the expectation of reciprocity, but as part of a “moral transaction” encompassing late twentieth-century perceptions of infancy, mothering, economy, and society. The idea that an infant might die because its family lacks the means to purchase breast milk has become morally repugnant, just as has the notion that a woman might earn a living by selling her milk.

The transformed meaning of breast milk production is illustrated by an article in the December 1982 Boston Globe describing the meeting between Lacie Lynette Smith of Oklahoma and the women whose milk had kept her alive. Born with a rare allergic condition, Lacie could ingest nothing but breast milk. Her mother, unable to feed her because she was on medication, drained “every milk bank we could find.” On the verge of running out of milk, she contacted the milk bank of Worcester, Massachusetts – one of thirty operating milk banks in the United States, and one with 275 donors. The Worcester milk bank started sending Lacie the milk she needed, and at the age of nineteen months Lacie traveled to New England to meet her unseen benefactors.