“So, whose milk was it? … It became all of ours, together”: A relational autoethnographic study of an interactional human milk donation process through bereavement

Abstract

Most of the research on human milk donations after prenatal loss has focused on donations to milk banks in which donors and recipients are anonymous to each other. In contrast, in this Israel-based study, we focus on an ongoing, direct interaction between a bereaved donor and recipients who adopted a new baby. We conducted a relational autoethnography, wherein multiple researchers present their life experiences and interpersonal contexts and meanings. We suggest that directed, interactional bereaved milk donation allows both parties to assign symbolic meanings to the milk, which may help their grieving process and can create relational healing.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the editor and reviewers for their very insightful and constructive feedback in the review process. We also would like to thank our friends and colleagues, Carmit Rosen Even-Zohar, Adi Barak, Tanya Cassidy, and Adi Segal, for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. We are also grateful to Maya Lavie-Ajayi for her help with ethical questions that came up, and for her overall encouragement and support. And finally, this paper couldn’t have been written, nor could the lived experiences themselves have happened this way at all, without the support of our dear spouses—thank you. The paper is dedicated to Elia Nadav Perez and Ayelet and Shaul’s baby.

Notes

1 In January 2022, the World Health Organization report listed Israel’s yearly average number of living kidney donors as just over 30 people per million (http://www.transplant-observatory.org/2020-international-activities-report/).

2 http://www.transplant-observatory.org/2020-international-activities-report/

3 https://www.health.gov.il/English/News_and_Events/Spokespersons_Messages/Pages/03082020_01.aspx

4 In Israel, stillborn babies are generally not eligible to have a funeral or a dedicated grave, but instead are most often buried in an infant mass grave without their parents present.

5 It is a well-known Israeli cultural belief and practice to place chilled cabbage leaves against the breasts of new mothers suffering from engorgement or over-supply, or those who may choose, for whatever reason, to suppress lactation. The leaves are thought to help to reduce swelling as milk supply diminishes, and to ease symptoms of engorgement in early breastfeeding.