Talk by Mathilde Cohen, Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut and 2024-2025 research-fellow at the Paris IAS (FIAS program), as part of the 2024-2025 seminar of the Institut d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques (IHPST, CNRS - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) organized by Marion Vorms et Philippe Huneman.

Event open to the public.
Conference in French.

Presentation

During her research fellowship, at the Paris IAS, Mathilde Cohen has been working on the project “A Mother’s Milk Belongs to the Child.” A History of the Law of Human Milk in France between Technology, Gender, and Colonialism (1910-2024). This project examines the institutionalization in France of a human milk banking system, that is, of the distribution of expressed milk rather than suckled directly from the breast. The process severs the physical link between the breastfeeder and the breastfed child through the intervention of medicine, technology, and law. From 1910 to 2024, the circulation of disembodied milk evolved from a form of welfare to “assist” destitute women and children into a biomedical system. After World War II, the practice was remodeled into a state-of-the-art medical service focused on the care of premature babies called “lactarium” (aka human milk bank). Law played a decisive role in this transformation—while the wet-nursing profession had primarily been the object of economic regulation rooted in work and competition law, banked human milk gradually came under the jurisdiction of health law, and later bioethics.

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