LEBANON — When Devon Pike was pregnant with her first child, her midwives told her she wouldn’t be able to breastfeed due to the size and shape of her breasts and nipples.
“That gave me this kick and desire; I’m going to breastfeed,” Pike, a 26-year-old Lebanon resident, said. “I was just so determined to make it happen.”
And she did. Not only did she breastfeed her first child, Danny, born in 2016, but she also breastfed her second, Dylan, born in 2017, and third, Delilah, born in 2019.
For nearly a year, she breastfed all three of them and produced an extra 40 ounces per day, which she donated to other families for their babies. She attributes her oversupply to pumping in addition to breastfeeding Danny, at the direction of her postpartum nurses, even though she stayed home with him and he didn’t need the milk she pumped.
“I have been given the opportunity to make this milk, I have to share it,” Pike said.
Pike’s extra milk led her to connect with families in search of more breast milk than they can produce themselves through unregulated breast milk exchanges. It also helped her to find a sense of purpose and pride.
She first went to Google to determine what to do with the extra milk and found many options, from formal milk banks, which pasteurize the milk, to people selling their breast milk on Craigslist.
She was glad to learn that there was something she could do with the extra milk, but she didn’t want to sell it. She knew from experience what it was like to be a young family struggling financially. If she hadn’t been able to breastfeed her children, she said she couldn’t have afforded to buy breast milk for them.
Inpatient families at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon who need donated breast milk are able to get it at no cost, Audra Burns, a D-H spokeswoman, said. Outpatients can purchase donor milk from the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Women’s Health Resource Center in Lebanon for $15 per 100 milliliter, or 3.4 ounce, bottle. That rate covers processing and shipping fees.
Pike landed on the idea of family-to-family donating. Her first donation in 2016 went to a Vermont family from the Burlington area she found on Facebook who drove down to get the milk for a baby they had adopted. She since has had a family travel from New York state for milk and she’s shipped it to California. She’s donated 24,000 ounces in total. In addition, she sometimes has served as a wet nurse, directly breastfeeding other babies.
“It’s been an amazing journey,” she said.
Zadiah Eisenberg, one of the leaders of the Claremont La Leche League, said informal milk sharing is one way that people work together to feed their babies. The league does not endorse any particular milk bank, but tries to help families find the information they need to decide how to feed their babies.
Eisenberg said the league supports the World Health Organization’s hierarchy of feeding, which she said states that breast milk directly from a mom to a baby is the best, then expressed milk from the mother and then expressed milk from another person.
The league “believes that moms know their babies and their situations best,” Eisenberg said.
Before talking through the options, however, Eisenberg said she would talk with moms about how they might increase their own milk supply.
From there, Eisenberg urges families to consult their doctor in considering possibilities. Formal milk banks pasteurize milk, which kills pathogens, and that can have both positive and negative effects. Formal milk banks also require that donors go through a screening process.
The Food and Drug Administration recommends against informal milk sharing because the milk may not have been screened for infectious diseases or contamination risk.
But Pike said if she had a disease such as untreated HIV, she would not breastfeed her own child. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend that mothers with HIV avoid breastfeeding due to the risk of transmitting the infection to the infant.) She invites families to talk with her midwife or see her blood work from her pregnancies, but typically the families she works with screen her by having a conversation.
Pike also is a doula, helping families navigate pregnancy, birth and postpartum periods. She’s become a peer lactation counselor through an online holistic birth professional training and birth education group, Herbal, and is in training to further those skills through the Massachusetts-based nonprofit Healthy Children Project. Her delivery in a hospital with Danny took 57 hours and inspired her to help other families through the challenging process. She had her second two children at home with the assistance of a midwife, who she now works with.
“I’m living my best life helping the moms and the families,” she said.
In 2020, Pike started a Facebook page Pass the Milk Project: New England to help families connect with each other and share milk. The page has more than 300 followers.
Producing as much milk as Pike has come with challenges.
“I literally couldn’t do anything,” she said of the year when she was breastfeeding all three of her children and also pumping milk to donate.
Her time was filled with breastfeeding, pumping the extra milk, eating high protein foods such as guacamole and hummus and drinking nearly two gallons of water a day. She didn’t have time for much else. It caused stress in her relationship with her partner and financial challenges.
She’s had mastitis, an infection of the breast tissue, 15 times in the past six years. Most of those infections were caused by her breasts becoming overfull with milk, she said. At times the infections were so severe that she became bedridden with a fever; “feeling like I was run over by a train.”
Pike breastfed all three children until the youngest, Delilah, was a little over a year old and Pike had a miscarriage, which led to a decrease in her milk production.
But she plans to continue the cycle by having another child.
“I’m very proud of myself,” she said. “…It’s been so full circle and so special. I’m honored to be able to produce this extra milk.”
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
