Some give the gift of holiday cheer this time of year, but one British mom wants to give you the gift of breast milk.
According to Yahoo! News, Rebecca Hudson, 26, is selling 5-ounce bottles of her breast milk this Christmas season for $20 a pop. She’s earned $4,750 from sales so far.
And those buyers have come in droves. Some have bought it to feed their children, others wanted it to make particular recipes that need breast milk and some use it to gain protein after working out, Yahoo! News reported.
“What they do with the milk is up to them. I’m not going to discriminate,” Hudson said, according to Yahoo! News, although breast milk is known to have some serious health benefits for newborns.
“In addition to containing all the vitamins and nutrients your baby needs in the first six months of life, breast milk is packed with disease-fighting substances that protect your baby from illness,” the BabyCenter Medical Advisory Board wrote.
Hudson, a mother of four who’s fallen on hard times financially, said in interviews that she’s selling the milk to pay for Christmas gifts for her family. The idea hit her when she found herself wasting a lot of the breast milk she produced for her daughter, who wasn’t drinking much of it, according to ITV News.
But should she be selling her breast milk? Advice columnist Dr. Manny Alvarez wrote in an article for Fox News that she shouldn’t. Alvarez said certain diseases, like HIV and Hepatitis B and C can be contracted through breast milk, and this only increases the risk of someone obtaining those medical conditions.
“So, while I feel for this young mother, assuming that her goals are noble, I have to caution on this practice as a way to make a quick buck because it could potentially make for a very sickly Christmas for someone else,” Alvarez wrote in her article.
Hudson isn’t alone in selling her breast milk, though. Only The Breast, for example, is an online community for mothers who donate their breast milk, which can be purchased at a variety of prices for a variety of ages.
This act by Hudson may also be helpful for many mothers out there who can’t breast feed. According to The Guardian, mothers may be naturally able to produce milk and feed their children, but it isn’t always an easy process — which leads to depression for some women.
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