Mom Selling Breast Milk to Bodybuilder For Up to $2 an Ounce
Photo via Fox 2
The mother of a five-month-old baby has found a new source of extra income: selling her breast milk.
Lisa Charbonneau, a stay-at-home mom of three, posted an ad this week on Craigslist offering her excess breast milk to the highest bidder — but she’s already taken the ad down after finding two customers who want a combined total of 428 ounces.
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The first taker, Charbonneau tells Yahoo Parenting, is a mom who can’t nurse but wants to feed her child breast milk. She has requested 300 ounces from Charbonneau by March 3 and is paying $115. The second customer is a bodybuilder who hopes that Charbonneau can deliver a gallon of breast milk. “He said he wants it for the vitamins and nutrients,” Charbonneau says. “We haven’t worked out a contract yet but I’ll probably charge between $1 to $2 per ounce.”
Charbonneau says she is charging the mother less because she knows what it’s like to want to provide your child breast milk and wants to help make that possible for another family. “I know if it was me and I wasn’t overproducing, I would go to the moon and back for breast milk, but I wouldn’t want to feel taken advantage of,” she says. “This milk is going to a baby, and I don’t want this mom to feel taken advantage of. Plus, she’s driving two hours to pick it up from me.”
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Pumping the extra 400-plus ounces won’t be a problem, Charbonneau says. “I pump more than 20 ounces a day, on top of exclusively breastfeeding my five-month-old and breastfeeding my 2-and-a-half-year-old once a day,” she says.
Charbonneau got the idea of selling her milk when her cousin, a bodybuilder, posted on Facebook about the protein benefits of breast milk. “I have three kids and power of attorney over my niece and nephew — with five kids and my husband being the only one working, I figured why not try to sell my milk?” she says. “I’m overproducing, my son doesn’t love a bottle, and I definitely don’t want my milk to spoil. It’s liquid gold, so this seemed like a good option.”
Charbonneau’s bodybuilder customer is part of a growing pool of men looking to add natural protein to their diet by way of breast milk. “I don’t believe in steroids or other energy supplements, none of that garbage,” one bodybuilder told the Cut last year. He said he pays about $2.50 an ounce for “natural stuff that’s God-given.”
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Dr. Maureen Groer, a professor and lactation researcher at the University of South Florida College of Nursing, has told Yahoo Parenting that customers should be careful when buying breast milk online. “There’s no way to know what diseases the woman who pumped the milk might have,” she said earlier. “How did she pump it? Were the pump parts sterile? Were the bottles used to store it sterile? Milk is a wonderful medium for bacterial growth if it’s not properly managed.”
Groer said donated milk is highly regulated, but milk sold online isn’t regulated at all. “The women [who donate] are tested for viruses like HIV and hepatitis. And the milk is handled carefully — it’s pasteurized, it’s pooled, and it’s flash-frozen, and delivered frozen to the hospitals that use it.”
For her part, Charbonneau says she has a doctor’s note to provide her customers. “It says I am in good health and that my milk is donatable,” she says. “I’ve also shared with them the two medications I’m on — a multivitamin and also an allergy medication, which doesn’t go into the breast milk.”
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