Wet nursing, a practice that seemed to go out of fashion along with live-in ladies’ maids, has seen a renaissance lately. A couple of years ago media stories started popping up about mothers hiring wet nurses or cross-nursing each other’s babies. There is even an agency in LA (where else?) that supplies wet nurses, which has reported steady growth in the practice.
Now, Salma Hayek has done some wet-nursing herself, on a humanitarian tour of Sierra Leone. While touring a hospital, the Hollywood actress and Unicef spokeswoman met a woman who could not feed her hungry baby boy. So she breastfed the baby herself.
Hayek later described how her great-grandmother did the same in a village in Mexico.
'My great-grandmother was in a Mexican village and they found a woman in the street inconsolably crying and the baby was also crying, crying, crying.
'My great-grandmother went up to her and said "What is the matter?" and the mother said, "She is very, very hungry and I have no more milk".
"And in the street my great-grandmother took the baby and breastfed that baby who instantly stopped crying and went peacefully to sleep."
Hayek has been vocal about the pleasures of breastfeeding her daughter. Breastfeeding is especially encouraged in developing countries as a healthy way to feed children when the water and food supply isn’t reliable and safe.
Interestingly, the US website Salon.com reports that La Leche League – perhaps the most vocal group supporting breastfeeding – doesn’t condone breastfeeding other people’s children. It says the practice can expose infants to hepatitis, HIV and other viruses, as well as disrupt maternal bonding and confuse the baby. Even back in the day, wet-nursing was a subject of considerable discussion.
This article from 1612 describes the six things to consider when choosing a wet nurse. A few essentials are a well-formed nose, a lack of stammer and breasts “full of Azure veines”.
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