If Breast Milk Is Made From And/or Contains The Mothers Blood Cells, Does This Mean That Jehovas Witnesses Cannot Breast Feed?

Breast milk is made from specialist sweat glands; milk (human milk, cow's milk, whatever kind) is basically enriched sweat.

Nutrients and other substances do diffuse from the blood into the milk across permeable membranes, but blood does not normally enter into the milk itself.

If a woman is unlucky and suffers from cracks in her areola she may end up bleeding as she feeds, leading to the baby ingesting some of mother's blood along with the milk. I think even JWs are pragmatic enough to see this as a problem that needs preventing and sorting not a reason to avoid breastfeeding altogether.

Moreover, it can be argued that the baby just drinks and digests the blood; what JWs object to is the commingling of blood from different people, and this would only happen via breastfeeding if the baby also had a sore or cut in the mouth.

For the same reasons that it's okay for the foetus's blood to commingle, a tiny bit with the mother's, in utero, via the placenta. It simply can't be prevented, and it's still far from the mixing of whole blood from one person with another.

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