“I'm looking for local fresh liquid gold”, “Breastmilk for athletic men”, “Healthy unvaccinated breastmilk”, “I want to try breastmilk”, “I sell drug and alcohol free baby milk”. Accessing the Only The Breast website, the most famous platform for buying, selling and donating breast milk, is confusing and disturbing. Its promoters ensure that the discreet system of classified ads allows "a clean, safe and private transaction." There are thousands of ads, most of them posted by residents of North America, but also from the rest of the world, and not all of them are looking for the precious milk to nurse their babies.
Among the seekers of this liquid gold there are athletes, mainly bodybuilders who use it as a supplement and who believe that breast milk increases muscle mass due to its nutrients and proteins; fetishists who find excitement in drinking this milk (lactophilia they call it); cancer patients who see in this liquid a palliative of the effects of chemotherapy; and, yes, also mothers of newborns who fail to produce the desired amount of milk.
At the beginning of 2022, the British newspaper The Guardian detected advertisements for the sale of breast milk on the eBay portal, whose managers announced shortly after the elimination of this type of classified advertisement, and other marketplaces (digital platforms with different online stores). But the phenomenon is not just a fad in the West. A year ago, it became known that lactating mothers sold their leftover milk on social networks such as Baidu Tieba, one of the most used online forums in China, and on Xianyu, the most famous second-hand website in the Asian country. On these platforms, 150 milliliters of frozen or fresh breast milk sold for between 6 and 40 euros, respectively.
If we zoom in closer, in Madrid, for example, we also find sellers of the precious fluid. In Only the Breast this ad is kept together with a contact email: “I am the mother of three children raised with exclusive breastfeeding. Currently, the little girl has started to eat other foods so I have a surplus of milk. I don't smoke, I don't drink alcohol, or drugs or medication. Very healthy, semi vegan diet. Price: €30 for 150 ml.”.
Product quality and safety. The first problem is that we don't know for sure what will arrive at our house because we don't know who is on the other side either. We can receive adulterated, spoiled or diluted milk with cow's milk or other liquids. We are not buying a piece of clothing online and we are not used to having a laboratory at home to analyze its composition. Beware of scams.
The danger of bacteria. Temperature, packaging and transport are essential so that breast milk does not lose any of its many properties and does not negatively affect the health of the baby who is going to ingest it. Incorrect conservation facilitates the multiplication of bacteria and viruses. According to a microbial study published in Pediatrics, 74% of breast milk samples purchased online were spoiled.
Transmission of infectious diseases. Breast milk is a biological fluid that can be a vehicle for certain infectious diseases such as hepatitis, syphilis, HIV or HTLV (acronym in English for human T-cell lymphotropic virus).
Exploitation of women. Another of the risks of converting the purchase and sale of breast milk into free trade is that of creating a black market that favors the exploitation of lactating mothers.
There will always be mothers who have plenty of milk and others who do not produce as much as they need or want, but what all the experts recommend going to breast milk banks. In Spain, where there is no regulation on the sale of breast milk, there are 16 institutions that store and process it. And most importantly, these banks donate the precious liquid. According to the Spanish Association of Breast Milk Banks, in 2021 there were 2,647 donors in Spain, who provided milk to 3,726 nursing babies. A total of 78 hospitals nationwide have milk distributed by these banks, which make a quality selection among the donors. Once the milk is extracted, it is frozen, transported to the banks and it is here where its nutritional properties are analyzed and it is guaranteed that they will not be a source of infections.
