If you are a breastfeeding mother who has ample milk and maybe extra, previously pumped milk in the freezer, there is now a place in Seattle to donate it.

Swedish Hospital’s First Hill campus is now a breast milk drop-off site for the Northwest Mothers Milk Bank.

“A milk drop is a place where mothers who have excess breast milk, who have gone through a pretty rigorous screening process, can drop off their frozen breast milk that then gets sent down to the Northwest Mother’s Milk Bank, which is in Portland, Oregon,” said Emily Pease, a 20-year lactation consultant and charge nurse for lactation services at Swedish.

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“There, it is pasteurized, it is pooled with all the other samples, and they test it for bacteria,” she said. “They have a very rigorous process through the Human Milk Banking Association of North America. Then it gets sent back out to different hospitals throughout the Pacific Northwest.”

Pease says you can’t just come in off the street and drop off your milk.

“She needs to be a non-smoker, be generally healthy, the baby should be at least six weeks old and she should have plenty of milk for her own baby,” Pease said. “They go through quite a rigorous screening process. They have a three- to four-page questionnaire, they have to get a sign-off from their baby’s provider and they get blood work done. Then they can drop the milk off.”

There are all sorts of reasons why a new mother may not be able to produce milk for her newborn.

“Most of the donor milk from the milk bank goes back to neonatal intensive care units across the region to help prevent a really devastating illness called necrotizing enterocolitis that attacks the baby’s gut. Premature babies’ immune systems are not well-developed, and breast milk really helps coat the intestine and prevent the passage of foreign protein. So it gives them a much better start.”

Breast milk is the perfect food, providing everything a baby needs for the first six months of their life. It bolsters their immune system and contains antibodies to fight off sickness. So if the mother of a premature baby can’t provide her own milk, another mother’s milk is the next best thing.

“The World Health Organization … their recommendation for infant feeding is mother’s own milk directly from the breast. The second priority is the mother’s own pump milk, the third is donor human milk. Then the fourth is formula.”

And for anyone who thinks it’s weird to give a baby another woman’s milk?

“We’ve had wet nurses for I don’t know how many thousands of years. One hundred years ago, if you couldn’t breastfeed, your sister might have a baby and might breastfeed your baby, or you hired a wet nurse,” Pease said. “We’ve been nursing each others babies for a long time, this is just another way of doing that.”

Not to mention the fact that we drink cow’s milk and eat cheese, which is the breast milk from a completely different species.

Emily says the Swedish drop-off site opened last October.

“We’ve had 3,500 ounces donated from 12 donors, so it comes and goes. We haven’t had anybody for a while. I think the last time we did, though, she filled up the entire freezer.”

They’re always looking for more, so if you’re interested in donating your breast milk, click here to find out how to start the screening process.

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