Sell your breast milk for extra money

Learned from the Work at Home Moms forum that new mothers can sell their extra breast milk online.  While some mothers breasts will be milk producing overachievers, others won’t put out enough for their babies.

According to MilkBanking.net, 1 in 8 babies in the United States are born premature every year and are in need of calories and protein to survive.  Women with premature infants in need of extra breast milk rely on healthy lactating mothers to supply what they cannot produce themselves.

Onlythebreast.com saw a need to bring underproducing moms together with the overproducers in the US, United Kingdom, and Canada.  This site allows healthy lactaters to post their milk for sale with some details about themselves.  Moms-in-need can communicate with each poster, develop a relationship, and get a feel for who might be the best provider.  Milk can be sold in categories such as milk-on-demand, milk bank certified, milk from vegan diet, and can even sell breast milk to men.

Mothers overwhelmed with excess milk do have the option to donate to a milk bank, which in turn sells the milk to hospital NICU’s from $5 – $20 per ounce.  Those who’d like to sell theirs online can earn up to $2.50 per ounce, making extra cash for the overproducing mother and a cheaper price for the receiving mom – a win for both sides.

Since this is a direct sale and in an unregulated environment compared to a milk bank, there will be concerns about milk quality and buying moms will need to have extensive conversations with the selling mothers in order to find who they feel will provide the best quality milk for their baby.  In the end, buying mothers will have to make their own call.

According to Parenting.com –

“While non-profit milk banks screen donations for drugs, hepatitis, HIV, and other diseases before selling the milk to hospitals, and have an extensive list of criteria for all donors, online trading sites like Only the Breast use an honor system and let buyer and seller work out their own deal and hand-off. For an overwhelmed new nursing mom, cutting out the middleman can make the whole process easier, and then there’s the financial pay-off too.

The FDA is worried about the booming unregulated milk market. Blood, semen and other bodily fluids are held up to super-strict health standards but because breast milk is considered food, so the guidelines are much more lax. Though no illnesses or death from donor breast milk has been reported, the FDA is concerned this loophole puts infants at risk.”

Many have done well receiving breast milk in this forum with no reported problems.  Some mothers are producing so much, they’re expecting to make over $10,000 from their milk, some are close to making $20,000!  Naturally it’ll vary per person, but I thought this was incredible money, breast milk has rightly earned the name “liquid gold” in more than one way.

 

Only the Breast – buy, sell, and donate natural breast milk