The Pettis County Health Center has just officially become a milk depot – which means they are now a drop off site for those wishing to donate human breast milk to help medically fragile and premature infants.
Linsey Curry and Debbie Anderson with the health’s center WIC program recently sat down with Lindsay McQuire at The Milk Bank, the nonprofit that collects, pasteurizes and distributes the breast milk.
They spoke about the role that breast milk donation can play for grieving families.
For the month of August, we're focusing on the health of those living in Sedalia and the surrounding areas.
Lindsay McQuire: We saw just a huge, massive gap in the support and access that these bereaved families were accessing across the continuum of their health care, especially when it comes to lactation.
So, in 2007 we officially started our bereavement work, and every year we have, on average, between 40 and 45 bereaved mothers who end up donating their milk to The Milk Bank in order to save the lives of other infants.
We have found, oftentimes, our families will tell us that donating milk can help them along their grief journey as a way to process and handle their grief.
And something people don't know and don't talk about is that women can lactate as early as between like 16 and 18 weeks.
So, we oftentimes think about lactation as a post-birth, you know, post-pregnancy, but that's just simply not really, absolutely true, and so, our bereavement program has really been built as a way to give these families a community and a support system and access to things that they've been really denied to.
When you're in the situation of having a miscarriage or having a stillbirth or losing an infant – a lot of your choices are taken away from you, quite honestly.
So, we are really staunch on the fact that we just want our families to know that they have choices and they have options, and they are empowered to make those decisions for themselves.
But there's just still so much shame and stigma and just pushing under the rug of these families and people just do not understand how to approach them, how to talk to them, what do they want to talk about?
We have our life saving legacy wall at our headquarters that has the names of all those infants lost during pregnancy or after birth, whose mothers have decided to donate their milk in order to save others.
And often times, our families will tell us that I don't get the chance to talk about my birth story. I don't get the chance to talk about my son or – this always gets me a little teary, y'all. I usually do pretty good – but, you know, I don't have the chance to say my child's name aloud. People don't ask me about my child or children.
And this opportunity gives them a way for their child to, like, live in perpetuity, because as long as our walls are up, that baby's name will be on our wall.
Ooh, sorry, I'm going to stop. Debbie, Lindsay – someone talk.
Laughter
Debbie Anderson: Well, the nice thing about WIC, too, is we will cover them with services for up to six months after a miscarriage or a stillbirth or whatever their incident was.
And when you think about that a little bit, that really flows and connects really well into this freezer that we now have out here in our hallway, you know?
If we can keep them connected to us through the food part of it, and then also be able to encourage them and say, “Hey, look, if you want to, if this would help you get through this, you do have an opportunity here at WIC, while you're here, to donate your breast milk and bring it in to us.”
