Kate Hackett
Okay, I’m admittedly not sure why this is even REMOTELY controversial, but it’s the internet and opinions be flyin‘.
When you’re breastfeeding, you aren’t supposed to drink. Makes sense. If you DO drink, which is also fine, you just have to pump and dump and use stored breastmilk or formula while the alcohol works its way out of your body.
But new moms have about 9000 things on their brains and sometimes things slip. So what do you do? Maybe you, like gregariously_grace, ask your sober pal to breastfeed your kid.
“When you’re a few drinks in so you let your friend nurse your baby,” Grace captioned in the TikTok while she looked on as her friend nursed her child. The tags read: #nursing #friendshipgoals #breastfeeding #breastfed #baby #babies #momsoftiktok #foryou #4you #4u #fedisbest #findyourgrace #nourisheveryyou.
The video quickly went viral with over 1.4 million views and thousands of comments.
Comments were, predictably, all over the place.
I’m going to go on the damn record: this is absolutely, perfectly fine. There is no controversy here. Feed your baby. Your milk, someone else’s, formula, who cares.
But not everyone thinks this way:
“Too intimate, not a chance. Don’t drink,” one person wrote.
Another pointed out to the above commenter, “It’s wild to me how many people think HUMAN milk from another person is wrong but are happy to feed their ‘milk’ from another species entirely 😏.”
“I’d absolutely let a friend feed my baby and I would of happily fed theirs when I was producing too,” TikToker Emmi-pearl Penn said.
Grace also posted a follow-up video explaining the situation.
“My friend has a 7-month-old,” she wrote over the video. “Her baby is out of state for the weekend. I let her nurse him to strengthen her immune system. And also to relieve her. It is absolutely okay to drink and nurse. If you’re feeling sober enough to drive you can nurse.”
The CDC, however, does say not drinking alcohol is the safest option for breastfeeding moms. Moderate alcohol consumption, however, is not known to be harmful to the baby, especially if the mom waits 2 hours after one drink.
Grace wrote, “I trust [my friend] to breastfeed my baby because she breastfeeds her own.”
In the second video, a person commented “people forget that they did this a lot throughout history. Some moms couldn’t produce back then so there were wet nurses.”
Today, there are even human milk banks for mothers that can’t nurse or need another source. The FDA writes that these banks “take voluntary steps to screen milk donors, and safely collect, process, handle, test, and store the milk.”
