Cross-nursing in the news
This incredible and unusual story about a community of women who stepped in to nurse a baby when his mother died in childbirth had me in tears this morning. Here are some excerpts:
Women step up to breast-feed motherless infant
Charles Moses Martin Goodrich was born at 3:26 a.m. Jan. 11 at Marquette General Hospital. Eleven hours after giving birth, his mother Susan Goodrich, 46, died of amniotic fluid embolism - a rare obstetric emergency that is not age-related, Goodrich said. Moses is the Goodrich’s second child - Julia was born in 2007 - and Susan’s fourth. Still in shock over his wife’s death, Goodrich realized he had to figure out a way to feed his newborn son…
“They didn’t carry any breast milk,” the history professor said about the hospital, so a nurse looked into getting some for Moses. As it turned out, the nearest place to get breast milk was in Kalamazoo, and it would take several days to have it delivered to Marquette.
In the meantime, Goodrich received a phone call from family friend Laura Janowski of Marquette, who was still nursing her fourth child, 1-year-old Emily. In her message, Janowski offered Goodrich to nurse Moses.
“That’s when it clicked in my head,” he said. “I wanted the baby to be nursed. That’s something that Susan would have wanted.”
One thing led to another when family friend Nicoletta Fraire of Marquette began organizing a group of women who may want to help feed Moses.
“Basically, a couple of phone calls were enough,” she said. “I just had to leave my name and phone number and calls started to come in.”
She also made contact with Sally Keskey, founder of the Yooper Nursers - a local breast feeding support group. Within a brief time, nearly 20 women were found who offered to breast-feed Moses. Many of them belong to the support group and had never met the Goodrich family before.
“These women are advocates of breast feeding,” Goodrich said.
A schedule was put together with feeding times at 9 a.m., noon, 1:30 , 4 , 6:30 and 8 p.m. Six times a day a different mother has been feeding Moses for the past two months. During the night, Goodrich bottle-feeds his son breast milk that was pumped by the women…
Cross-nursing in this country is uncommon and often reviled. Many women are completely disgusted by the idea of it. But this story of a group of women giving up their time and bodies to feed and nurture a motherless child is inspiring. Moses isn’t only getting the benefit of breastmilk, he’s getting the benefit of skin to skin contact.
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