Breastfeeding across the World: Celebrating Mother’s Milk in Mongolia

Following a brutally cold winter, the first March day that the temperature broke freezing, Mongolians rejoiced by spending the day outdoors. Young mothers lounged outside at the local ski resort, breastfeeding bundled babies while their older children played on the slopes.

When the weather is warm enough, this type of scene is typical here. It is not unusual to see women breastfeeding on city benches, on public buses, or at department stores. In Mongolia, breast-feeding culture is much different from that of the United States—both in where it is done and who consumes the milk. Publicly feeding a child is both normal and celebrated: the capital city’s National Park features a statue of a woman breastfeeding twins, and its highest monument features a mosaic depiction of a mother feeding her child.

My fourteen-year-old neighbor reads American news articles to practice her English. She came to me one day for help understand an article she had read about breastfeeding in the United States. She was confused about why a woman had been yelled at for breastfeeding in public. “What do they think is wrong with it?” and, “But where else should she do it if she is not at home?” she asked. In a culture where breastfeeding is not stigmatized, treatment of breastfeeding mothers in the United States causes bafflement.

Mongolia’s more open breastfeeding culture can take some getting used to. One day in class, a young American man teaching English in Ulaanbaatar noticed a student turned towards the back of the room, engaged with what he assumed was her cell phone. He approached her to reprimand her, but upon reaching her, he saw that she was milking herself into a cup. Embarrassed and uncomfortable, he quickly backed away. Now, after several months of teaching, he’s grown used to women using breast pumps, milking themselves, or breastfeeding their newborns in his classroom. When relating this story to a group of friends, a Mongolian male said nonchalantly, “Oh, she must have been in pain and needed to release milk.” This open breastfeeding culture, as well as Mongolians’ agrarianism and frequent interaction with livestock, has made young men here familiar with biological processes.

There is a demand for breast milk everywhere, of course. Some women are unable to produce it in large enough quantities or even at all due to medical conditions. And in the United States, high occurrences of adoption— especially amongst LGBTQ couples—has created a glut of parents looking for a milk supply for their children due to its nutritional superiority to formula alternatives (World Health Organization, 2016). A market has formed, allowing parents to purchase breast milk from “milk banks” or directly from suppliers (Dutton, 2011). Correspondingly, selling breast milk has become an opportunity to earn sometimes-significant income for mothers with extra supply.

In Mongolia, by contrast, breast milk is most often given freely and informally to friends in need, though is sometimes traded for food supplies such as bread or eggs. While parents using borrowed and untested breast milk are doing so for the health of their child, they may be inadvertently exposing them to health risks. The Food and Drug Administration of the United States warns against the practice, citing exposure to infection and viruses, as with the exchange of other bodily fluids (Costa, 2015). This wariness does not seem to exist in Mongolia.