Interesting Reading

This is an article I found on Time Health & Science. I found it very interesting and wanted to share it with all of you.

Slama Hayek, Breast-feeding and one very public service.

If anyone on the planet could convince men that breast-feeding moms can have a sex life, it would be Salma Hayek. The beautifully busty actress, on a trip to Sierra Leone to support a tetanus-vaccination project, nursed a starving baby she encountered while being filmed by ABC News. She did this, she told the camera crew, in part out of compassion for a suffering child, but also to help lift the stigma against breast-feeding in Africa, where men often think women can't have sex if they're still nursing. "So the husbands, of course, of these women are really encouraging them to stop [breast-feeding]," Hayek said.

But if breast-feeding is taboo in Africa, cross-nursing — in which one woman suckles another's baby — is taboo in the U.S. While crunchy sites like Mothering.com have exploded with hundreds of giddy posts praising Hayek for promoting the cause of breast-feeding, plenty of online reactions were more squeamish. EW.com gave the YouTube clip its "biggest eyebrow raiser" of the day award. (See the top 10 pregnant performers.)

Although donating breast milk is becoming more mainstream — Nadya Suleman's octuplets have been consuming donated milk — cross-nursing still conjures up the specter of wet-nursing, with all its class issues and antiquated notions about women's bodies yoked in service to others. The official word on cross-nursing is still nix. It seems that no institution, even those that support milk-sharing, is willing to endorse women who offer their milk without a breast pump serving as an intermediary.

The Human Milk Banking Association of North America, which screens and distributes donated milk to hospitals across the U.S. and Canada, insists that banked milk be pasteurized before being distributed.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

I think it is awesome of her to do that. I don't care that she is a celebrity, I think it was done from the heart. I have always said, if I found an infant that was hungry, I would nurse it, no question.