Kate Garraway: Would you let another woman breast-feed your baby?



It's a deliberately provocative picture. And here TV's Kate Garraway asks an equally provocative question...



Would you let a cow breast-feed your baby? It's an arresting question. And it is meant to make you think, much in the same way as this photo of me.



Would I - would you - ever breast-feed a baby calf? The answer, I'm sure, is a resounding no. It is an unsettling image - a woman offering her breast, and her milk, to an animal. It goes against the laws of nature we have been taught to respect.

But the picture is also meant to be challenging - for, if you think about the first question again, hundreds of thousands of women do choose to rear their babies from cow's milk (after all, that's what formula milk is derived from) instead of their own.



Unsettling: Kate Garraway with a calf apparently suckling. Yet we feed cow's milk to our babies

And yet, reverse the concept, and there's an outcry.

Don't get me wrong. I do not support the idea of humans breastfeeding calves, but posing for this picture, I did want to provoke a debate - and one that I feel is important.

With whether to breast-feed or not being one of motherhood's perennial debates, is it really OK to feed your infant child milk from a completely different species?



And if breast really is best, and you cannot provide the milk yourself, would it better to let someone else breast-feed your child for you?

My journey into this tricky and provocative subject came through a Channel 4 documentary called Other People's Breast Milk - and the last two months of filming has challenged everything I originally held as sacred.

I am a mother to a two-year-old girl, Darcey. I came to motherhood relatively late - at 38 - and so by the time I was pregnant, I had had years of 'breast is best' indoctrination, from newspaper articles to doctors and midwives and even my own family.

All cited proven medical research that breast-fed babies had lower cholesterol levels later in life, that they would be less likely to have chest, stomach and ear infections and less likely to get allergies like asthma or illnesses like diabetes later in life.

Even for mothers there was evidence that breast-feeding reduced the risk of ovarian and breast cancer as well as helping with post-baby weight-loss.

By the time I gave birth, I was a convert. I fully believed that breastfeeding was the best way to give my daughter a good start in life. Formula, as far as I was concerned, was a last resort. But when Darcey started breast-feeding, it was brutal.

As women we are conditioned to see our breasts as 'sexy' and a means of attracting the opposite sex. I had been one of them - often wearing a dress that flattered my figure and showed off my chest to its best advantage.

Then suddenly I had a baby attached to my breast and she was sucking, literally, for her life. It was painful, I was constantly sore and at times I even bled. After three weeks I certainly didn't feel sexy, I felt a bit like a milk cow who existed only to provide food for her child.

Kate came to motherhood quite late, aged 38. She recalls breastfeeding often left her feeling sore and sometimes caused bleeding

Being in that much pain was firstly, a surprise - yummy mummies sell the myth that breast-feeding is a wonderful, happy, natural thing - but also made me tearful, worrying constantly that I wasn't providing properly for Darcey.

But was my milk good enough? Was my pain affecting the quality of the milk I was producing? As a new mother you feel an immense pressure that a child is depending on you alone for survival, and I was utterly unprepared for that feeling.

I remember my mother - who had breast-fed my brother and me - coming to see me and taking Darcey out of my hands. 'You are going to sleep for an hour, I am going to take Darcey downstairs and give her a bottle of formula,' she told me matteroffactly. At first I wanted to protest - it was against all I had been taught by the midwives - but as I drifted off to sleep it became a relief.

For one hour, it wasn't up to me to keep Darcey alive and I decided that alternating the occasional formula milk with my own would be a workable solution. I soon felt quite comfortable going to work for a few hours, leaving my husband Derek and Darcey with a bottle of formula - and it never once bothered me that it came from a cow.

After all, I reasoned, we drink cow's milk as adults anyway. In fact, it made coming home and breast-feeding Darcey myself more special - it was our time, something only Mummy could provide, and helped me bond with my daughter. After a few weeks, thankfully, the pain stopped.

But if anyone had suggested another woman breast-feeding my child, while I was out, I would have been horrified. The idea of 'cross-feeding', or wetnursing as it used to be known, was against everything I treasured as a mother, even in spite of all the initial pain I went through during the first few weeks.

It sounds ridiculous now, but as far as I was concerned, another woman breast-feeding my child would have felt like a mini-kidnapping, so invasive was it of my maternal bond with my daughter.

And, I reasoned, if any modern day mothers did actually employ someone to breast-feed their child for them, they were probably in the same mould as the 'Too Posh to Push Brigade'. I was ready to challenge any mother who argued otherwise.

But over the past two months something incredible has happened. I have met some of the most interesting, articulate and sensible women, and they have convinced me that perhaps I have judged the entire issue wrongly.

I spoke to women from across the UK and America, doctors, barristers, authors, artists and office workers - all of them united by their desire to give their child the best, and all believing that the best was breast, and breast alone.

No one I met has denied that breastfeeding someone else's baby is a controversial topic. In fact, many of the 'cross-feeding' women I interviewed refused to be filmed feeding other people's babies, because they feared being judged by their local communities.

While they were happy to speak about it and be identified, they still appreciated that many people would still be horrified to see it happen.



But they all remained adamant that any mother who would prefer to feed their child formula, rather than allow their child to benefit from the nutrition of breast milk, is merely selfish - me included.

One of the first - and most remarkable - women I encountered was Vanessa Beecroft, a renowned artist living in Italy. A mother herself, she was watching a programme on the children starving in Sudan in Africa and felt immediately that she had to do something, and flew out to help with the rescue effort.

Kate with her psychotherapist husband Derek Draper and their two-year-old daughter Darcey

When she arrived in Sudan, she went to a refugee camp and encountered two newborn twins on the verge of death. They were orphans and the aid workers couldn't get them to feed on formula milk.



Instinctively, Vanessa gathered the babies to her breast and started feeding them. Since she was still breastfeeding her own toddler, she was still producing milk, and within weeks the twins were thriving.

Vanessa and the aid workers in Sudan are convinced that her act of instinctive mothering saved those babies' lives. It was, she explained, a mixture of pure maternal instinct and the desire to do anything she could to help dying children survive.

While I was filming with her, she showed me a picture she'd taken of her breast-feeding the newborns. It had made local headlines in her hometown in Italy, but because she was a white woman and the two babies she had breast-fed were black, she received death threats, such is the shocking and often political nature of this subject.

Listening to her story, I suddenly began to understand how a woman could be moved to do something like that. As a mother myself, the instinct to provide for a child - any child - is incredibly strong, and for the first time I felt that perhaps, in the same situation, I could do the same thing. But still, I reasoned, that was different.

Those children were dying and surely anyone who was able would want to save a life. That was not the same as my handing their child over to a friend or stranger for them to breast-feed.

That thought was almost repulsive. But as filming for the documentary progressed, I was forced to confront my prejudices further.

I was introduced to Jane, a yoga teacher in London, who is childless.

Some years back, she had been babysitting for a friend, when the baby started to cry. Utterly instinctively, she told me, she lifted the baby to her breast, only to comfort her. The child latched on, started sucking and was pacified.

Because she was childless, Jane produced no milk, but - incredibly - a few days later, her breasts did start lactating. Medical research has shown that if a woman stimulates her breast through a nipple massage or a baby sucking upon it, milk can start to be produced.

Sounds unbelievable? Well, I sat in a room with a childless woman and watched her pump milk out of her breast. And when Jane babysat for her friend again, and the baby cried, she immediately lifted it to her breast and started feeding.



Hearing this story, I was deeply shocked, particularly as Jane admitted that initially she didn't tell her friend what she had been doing.

GMTV presenter Kate spent two months filming the Channel 4 documentary Other People's Breast Milk which challenged her views about breastfeeding

But - incredibly, I felt - Jane's friend had no qualms when the subject was finally broached. She decided that if she couldn't be there to provide for her child, she'd rather that someone she liked and trusted could do it for her.



Other mothers went further and actually employed women specifically to breast-feed their children. Two sisters I met - Raj and Prettal Mehtal, from Surrey - even allowed each other to feed their two respective babies, born seven months apart.

To my suggestion that this was interrupting the mother and child bond, they argued that I was the person in the wrong - and that if I really cared and loved my daughter, I would want to feed her the best milk, full stop. And formula milk was a poor substitute.

If I couldn't give enough breast milk myself, I should be looking to other women - and not to a cow. As they put forward their arguments - against all my better instincts - I started to understand the point.



Breast milk - it is scientifically proven - is a truly incredible substance, able to mutate depending on the weather, a baby's health and even to combat illnesses.

Indeed, science has proven that if, for example, a mother travels from a cold country to a hot country she produces breast milk with more fluid in it in order to make sure the child stays properly hydrated.

Similarly, if I was breast-feeding Darcey and someone in the room sneezed, within hours my body would have produced antibodies, which through the milk would protect my baby from those germs.

But these women were arguing about more than just proteins - it was about mothering. They pointed out that wet-nursing has been around for centuries. True, in some cases, it was in rich Victorian families who had a nanny, a nurse, a governess and a wet-nurse, which kept their children at a removed distance.

But, in many other cases, it was about easing the burden of motherhood. Breast-feeding is incredibly draining. It can hurt, and it often leaves you with no free time. The women I met all had jobs and husbands and lives - and many of them had found friends who were more than willing to help ease the burden of juggling all their obligations.

I was impressed by their arguments and their gentleness - these weren't bra-burning feminists, but women who had found a way to ease their load, without having to resort to relyingon milk from a cow. During my research for the programme, I looked into the health benefits of breast milk, and the results are astounding.

There is a strong case to be made for instances of breast cancer being much lower among women who breast-feed, and I believe more medical research into the potential cancer-combating properties of breast milk has to be done.

For a woman who happily combined breast-feeding and formula milk, I feel my whole belief system has been shaken up. I would never judge a woman for choosing bottle over breast, it's her right, and I do strongly believe that a happy mother equals a happy baby. But if I had another child, would I feed him or her cow's milk? Not if I could help it.

It's breast all the way, and if that milk had to come from someone else, then I hope I would have the courage to at least consider the option. And if that's a little shocking, maybe you too should think twice - and consider whether that's really any more weird and 'icky' than 'breastfeeding your child from a cow.

• Other People's Breast Milk is on Channel 4 on Wednesday, September 9 at 10pm.



