ABSTRACT
Milk sharing is an emergent infant-feeding practice in which a breastfeeding mother nourishes a child who is not her own biological offspring through privately negotiated altruistic breastmilk gifts. Practices refer to actions and behaviors that are nested within a biomedical paradigm and further reify discourses. Themes reflected the variety of reasons for donation, reasons for requesting breastmilk, milk sharing philosophies and ideologies, discourses of milk sharing in the popular media, testimonials about the positive experiences of milk sharing, resources for breastfeeding, and information on the various strategies for collecting, storing, and delivering breastmilk. The ways in which the values, ideologies, and principals of informal milk sharing are translated into practice push the demedicalization of breastmilk. The overwhelming majority of breastmilk donors are female and also identify as women and mothers. Prospective milk bank donors and milk sharing donors alike are almost always healthy breast-feeding mothers who are happily “sharing breastmilk” with their own infants.
