Why The Old School Wet Nurse Making A Comeback

It’s a scene some will find unnatural. After all, there are few activities more intimate than breastfeeding your child.

Yet a quarter of mums would consider a woman other than themselves breastfeeding their baby to help out when they are unable to, research has revealed. 

The survey, by website Netmums, found that out of more than 2000 mothers, one in seven believed a wet nurse was the next best thing to breastfeeding their child. The study follows the controversial decision by 26-year-old mother Jessica Anne Colletti to post images of her breastfeeding her son and a friend’s child at the same time.

The story, posted by Stay At Home Mum two weeks ago, was followed by a barrage of comments varying from support to utter disgust.

I have since heard of several circles of parents where it is accepted that if you babysit for someone else’s newborn, it is OK to breastfeed them (with the parents’ consent). This informal wet-nursing is called “shared feeding” or “cross-nursing.”

When you think about it, formula milk has only been available since the early 1900s. Before then wet-nursing would have happened as a matter of course if the mother was ill or absent. Yet, in three generations it has become socially unacceptable for mothers to practice wet nursing, let alone share it on social media.

I wonder if our attitudes towards the “freakishness” of wet nursing betray what we really think about breastfeeding itself. We still don’t completely accept it as what it is “” natural, normal, instinctive. It’s bizarre.

So, after reading through hundreds of comments online, back and forth arguments for the cause, I came across a story that may change your opinion on the matter.

It read:

“Would you like…” I heard myself asking a woman I had only met at a play-date twenty minutes prior, “me to breastfeed your baby?”

She looked at me uncertainly. Tears running down her face, the desperate cries of her hungry child piercing our conversation. Frustration and fear and I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE etched onto her face.

I reassured her that I was healthy and I disclosed my diet and medical history as it pertained to nursing a child. Someone beside me nodded, a mutual friend reassuring the woman that they’d known me for quite some time now and I was telling the truth. And she looked relieved – so relieved.

“Please,” she said desperately, placing her infant in my arms, “please, yes, please. Thank you so much.”

I only nursed her son for a brief while. I squirted milk on his lips so that he would focus and when he smelled the milk, he lunged at my nipple and latched. I relaxed, felt my milk let down, and he sputtered as he hungrily gobbled it down. “It’s okay, little guy,” I said. When he had suckled enough to take the edge off his hunger and his mother had calmed down enough to feel confident trying again, I popped his latch and handed him back. This time, there were no tears. There was no panic, no crying, no frantic begging other mums for a bottle. “Place your nipple under his nose,” I told her, “and there you go!” Her child latched, she let down, and she fed.

Tell us, would you let another woman breastfeed your child?