Salma Hayek Breast Feeding

If any person 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 hungry baby she encountered while being filmed by ABC News. She did this, in part out of compassion for a suffering child, but also to help lift the tarnish 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 erratic posts praising Hayek for dignifying the cause of breast-feeding, plenty of online reactions were more squeamish.

Although offering 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 outmoded notions about women's bodies yoked in service to others. The official word on cross-nursing is still objectionable. It seems that no institution, even those that support milk-sharing, is willing to give the nod 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 allotted.

"Babies gainfrom human milk donated by other mothers when their own mother's milk is unavailable," La Leche League says in its cross-nursing and wet-nursing statement. But, the statement continues, the group's breast-feeding advocates "shall not ever suggest an informal milk-donation compromise, including wet-nursing or cross-nursing."

La Leche's concerns include the possibility of transmitting infections, a drop in supply for the donor's own baby, psychological confusion on the part of the infant and the fact that the composition of breast milk changes as children get older.

But as guessing that Hayek wasn't at risk of contracting anything from the baby who Hayek reported was healthy but whose mother simply had no milk none of these possibilities seem applicable. Hayek's emergency nursing more closely resembles Chinese policewoman Jiang Xiaojuan's heroic breast-feeding of several babies orphaned by the May earthquake, and few would disagree she was anything but a lifesaver.

Sure, it was only one feeding, and that baby who was born on the same day as Hayek's daughter will need a lot more milk to see him safely out of infancy. But perhaps Hayek's expression will indeed make a difference to the breast-feeding cause in Africa. And if nothing else, the world's cross-nursers deep equated with wet nurses and made to feel shame for their hippie ways suddenly have the most glamorous spokeswoman they could ever have thought up.


Find Your Dream Job Online Today.