Breast milk is best for babies. There's no doubt about that.
Breast-feeding also brings a mother a sense of fulfillment. But if she's doing it to another woman's baby without the mother's permission, that only means trouble.
Day Care Worker Breast-fed Another Woman's Baby
A North Carolina mother is both mad and disgusted that a day care worker breast-fed her 3-month-old son without her knowledge.
Kaycee Oxendine had a security footage showing a woman she barely knew cradling her son and adjusting her blouse to breast-feed him. Upon learning that the child was suffering from constipation that day, the woman offered to breast-feed him as a natural remedy, but Oxendine said she firmly told her no twice.
"She said that she had a son and did I want her to put my child to her breast and breast-feed? And I said no, that's nasty. We don't do things like that," Oxendine recalled.
Despite her refusal, the day care worker was seen in the surveillance video picking up Oxendine's baby and breast-feeding him, stopping only when a co-worker stood up to leave.
Both women work for the Carrboro Early School and have children enrolled there as well. Day care Director Daron Council announced that the day care worker has already been fired. He said the unnamed employee was licensed and had been working in child care for more than 10 years.
Mother: Breast Milk Made My Lactose-Intolerant Baby Sick
On the evening of Friday, Feb. 3, Oxendine said her son went ill and started throwing up, prompting her to rush him to the UNC Hospital in Chapel Hill.
According to reports, Oxendine's son is a premature baby and is lactose-intolerant. Unable to produce a sufficient amount of lactase, lactose-intolerant babies will have difficulty digesting breast milk or infant formula from cow's milk. Symptoms of lactose intolerance in babies usually involve diarrhea, irritability, and passing gas.
The Controversy of Cross Nursing Or Wet Nursing
In 2009, Salma Hayek hit the front page of newspapers when she was caught on camera breast-feeding another woman's baby during a goodwill trip to Africa. Hayek was breast-feeding her then 1-year-old daughter, Valentina, when she thought of sharing her milk with a starving infant from Sierra Leone, a nation that has the highest infant mortality rate in the world partly because of malnutrition.
Although frowned upon in modern America, wet-nursing (constant breast-feeding of another mother's infant) and cross-nursing (occasional breast-feeding of another infant while also nursing one's own child) are common practices in some cultures.
The La Leche League International, a breast-feeding advocacy organization, stresses the importance of thorough screening should a mother wish to try cross-nursing. The nursing mother should be generally healthy, not taking prescription drugs, and not drinking alcohol or drugs. She and her child should also be free from any infectious disease (such as tuberculosis, syphilis, hepatitis-associated antigen, cytomegalovirus, or herpes virus).
