An out of the ordinary experiment in cooperative enterprise has been started in America. Medolac, an Oregon-based company working in conjunction with the Clinton Global Initiative will “seek to increase breast-feeding rates among urban African-American women” and promote “healthy behavior and prolonged breast-feeding within their communities” by establishing the Mothers Milk Cooperative, the only milk bank owned and operated by nursing mothers.
The Mothers Milk Cooperative, established with the Medolac founder Elena Medo’s participation in 2013, pays approved members who have been screened and have completed blood testing $1 an ounce for their milk. In turn, the cooperative has an exclusive producer/processor agreement with Medolac, which processes the milk into a commercially sterile, shelf-stable product and sells it to hospitals for about $7 an ounce.
Targeting low-income Detroit women with the lure of climbing out of poverty by selling their surplus milk raises many ethical questions. It’s one thing to commodify mother’s milk, but quite another to try to commodify a group of women — specifically black women, who already have a difficult history with breast-feeding.
The argument that selling breast milk will increase the economic empowerment of the low-income mothers of Detroit is similarly speculative. Rare is the mother who will produce enough excess milk, at $1 an ounce, to affect her family’s economic situation significantly. According to the Human Milk Banking Association of America, the average mother produces 200 ounces of oversupply every two months.
-based on a blog written in Time magzine
