Abstract
Most of the research on human milk donations after prenatal loss has focused on donations to milk banks in which donors and recipients are anonymous to each other. In contrast, in this Israel-based study, we focus on an ongoing, direct interaction between a bereaved donor and recipients who adopted a new baby. We conducted a relational autoethnography, wherein multiple researchers present their life experiences and interpersonal contexts and meanings. We suggest that directed, interactional bereaved milk donation allows both parties to assign symbolic meanings to the milk, which may help their grieving process and can create relational healing.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 938-947 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Death Studies |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| Early online date | 9 Nov 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Funding
We wish to thank the editor and reviewers for their very insightful and constructive feedback in the review process. We also would like to thank our friends and colleagues, Carmit Rosen Even-Zohar, Adi Barak, Tanya Cassidy, and Adi Segal, for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. We are also grateful to Maya Lavie-Ajayi for her help with ethical questions that came up, and for her overall encouragement and support. And finally, this paper couldn’t have been written, nor could the lived experiences themselves have happened this way at all, without the support of our dear spouses—thank you. The paper is dedicated to Elia Nadav Perez and Ayelet and Shaul’s baby.