‘Whose Milk Was It, Really? … It Was a Gift, a Savior, a Healer, and a Connector’: Reflections on a Collaborative Autoethnography of Breastmilk Donation after Stillbirth

‘Whose Milk Was It, Really? … It Was a Gift, a Savior, a Healer, and a Connector’: Reflections on a Collaborative Autoethnography of Breastmilk Donation after Stillbirth

Timor-Shelvin S; Oreg A; Perez AS

British Journal of Social Work

2023

Collaboration; Bereavement; Grief; Interpersonal Relations; Life Experiences; Infant Death; Perinatal Death; Lactation; Milk Banks; Milk, Human; Donor Milk; Paternal Attitudes; Ethnographic Research; Living Donors; Milk; Milk Ejection

This is the intertwined story of three unique individuals—each of us parents, researchers, givers and takers—who met and changed each other’s lives, whilst simultaneously struggling to comprehend and make meaning out of our own personal losses. After coming to terms with their inability to have another biological child, Shachar and his wife adopted a baby. Ayelet and Alison both gave birth to stillborn babies. Subsequently, Ayelet followed conventional Israeli medical guidelines dictating the drying up of her milk, whilst Alison rejected those regulations and chose to continue lactating, which eventually led to her donating her milk to Shachar’s adopted baby. Our stories are grounded in the patriarchal Israeli context that pressures bereaved individuals to ‘move on’ quickly, silencing loss and grief (Leichtentritt et al., 2016). In this reflective piece, we propose a perspective on our interconnected story of human milk donation as a counter-practice to silencing loss, by allowing shared relational grief. [...]

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