Mum of Two Wants To Establish Global Wet-nursing Network

A 27-year-old mother of two is spreading the word about the benefits of wet-nursing, revealing that she has personally breastfed more than 12 babies who were not her own children.

Lacey Dangerstone from Fort Worth, Texas, in the USA hopes to encourage others to breastfeed their friends’ children.

According to the Daily Mail, she started wet-nursing other babies a few months after her first daughter, Luna, was born in 2012. Friends of Lacey’s sister needed to go away for the weekend, leaving their nine-month-old child. Lacey was producing more milk than Luna, aged four months at the time, needed so she offered to stay at the other couples’ house for the weekend to ensure their baby was comfortable and fed.

Since then, Lacey has wet-nursed other children, including her nephew, friends’ children, and the children of friends of friends.  She says she continued wet-nursing throughout her second pregnancy in 2014.

The former nanny claims that she has had an interest in wet-nursing since she was a child and was fed by other women than her own mother, and wants to break down the taboos in society about wet nursing.

“My mum had to go back to work and hired a babysitter who was breastfeeding her own baby and said if she wanted to feed me to give it a go.

It was never taboo for me,” she said.

Currently, Lacey is wet-nursing a friend’s baby once a week, babysitting on Fridays while the child’s mother returns to work.  She doesn’t expect payment for wet-nursing, even if she is being paid to babysit.

She says she’s establishing a global network of mothers in Australia, the UK, Europe, Canada and the USA who can establish wet-nursing groups in their communities to ensure that babies don’t go without the nurturing experience of breast feeding when they cannot be breast fed by their mothers.

Lacey says while she’s faced some criticism on social media about wet-nursing, she has no plans to give up any time soon.

“My view of wet nursing is that it feels right and is a natural important thing for the child. I could express milk into a bottle, the mother could express milk into the bottle but that is a lot of fuss when you have a breast available and milk literally at the ready,” she said.

Mummy’s milk is still the best!