Paper short abstract:

Focused on wet nursing and human milk donation, the goal of this paper is to expose that the current debates on surrogacy and fragmented maternity, due to advances in assisted reproductive technologies, and the relationship between kinship and market, are not necessarily new phenomena in Europe

Paper long abstract:

Human milk has long been linked to the construction of motherhood, with breastfeeding and maternity constituting a cultural ideal in many societies. However, what happens when breast milk does not come from the biological mother but from another woman, a hired wet-nurse or from a breast milk "donation" in a milk bank? Can we talk about fragmented motherhood? Considering this third party involvement in the reproductive process, the goal of this presentation is to expose that the current debates on fragmented maternity, motivated by advances in assisted reproductive technologies, and the resulting relationship between kinship and market (commodification of kinship), are not necessarily new phenomena in Europe. In order to illustrate the analogy between wet-nurses and surrogacy today, and by extension trying to bring new theoretical insights into the study of kinship- which will imply to broaden our definition of biological reproduction when breaking conceptual borders between reproduction (blood/ genes) and nutrition (human milk)- two ethnographic studies will be analyzed. The first one, more historical, will be based on the role of the Pasiega domestic wet-nurse in the construction of milk kinship once her milk circulated and was shared through salaried lactation in Spain, and a second one, within the context of transnational Muslim communities in Barcelona, focused on the construction milk kinship among two or more infants not biologically related until the moment of shared lactation, when accepting milk from a women donor in a milk bank.