Kwazy's Person of the Day

In a world where celebrities collect third-world babies like little toy dogs, here is a completely genuine act of compassion:

Salma Hayek nurses starving baby

If anyone on the planet can convince men that breastfeeding moms can have a sex life, it would be Salma Hayek. The beautifully busty actress, on a trip to Sierra Leone to support a tetanus vaccination project, nursed a starving baby she encountered while being filmed by ABC News. She did this, she told the camera crew, in part out of compassion for a suffering child, but also to help lift the stigma against breastfeeding in Africa, where men often think women can't have sex if they're still nursing. "So the husbands, of course, of these women are really encouraging them to stop," Hayek said.

But if breastfeeding is taboo in Africa, cross-nursing — in which one woman occasionally suckles another's baby — is taboo in America. While crunchy sites like Mothering.com have exploded with hundreds of giddy posts praising Hayek for promoting the cause of breastfeeding, plenty of online reactions were more squeamish. EW.com gave the YouTube clip its "biggest eyebrow-raiser" of the day award. (Read "Top 10 Pregnant Performers".)

Although donating breast milk is becoming more mainstream — Nadya Suleman's octuplets have been consuming donated milk — cross-nursing still conjures up the specter of wet-nursing, with all its class issues and antiquated notions about women's bodies yoked in service to others. The official word on cross-nursing, too, is still nix. It seems that no institution, even those that support milk sharing, is willing to endorse women who share their milk without a breast pump serving as intermediary. The Human Milk Banking Association of North America, which screens and distributes donated milk to hospitals across the U.S. and Canada, insists banked milk be pasteurized before being distributed.

"Babies benefit from human milk donated by other mothers when their own mother's milk is unavailable," La Leche League says in its cross-nursing and wet-nursing statement. But, the statement continues, one of the group's breastfeeding advocates "shall not ever suggest an informal milk-donation arrangement, including wet-nursing or cross-nursing."

La Leche's concerns include the possibility of transmitting infections, a decrease in supply for the donor's own baby, psychological confusion on the part of the infant, and the fact that the composition of breast milk changes as children get older.

But assuming Hayek wasn't at risk of contracting anything from the baby — who Hayek reported was healthy but whose mother simply had no milk — none of these caveats seem relevant. Hayek's emergency nursing more closely resembles Chinese policewoman Jiang Xiaojuan's heroic breastfeeding of several babies orphaned by the May earthquake, and few would argue she was anything but a lifesaver.

Sure, it's only one feeding, and that baby — who was born the same day as Hayek's daughter — will need a lot more milk to see him safely out of infancy. But perhaps Hayek's gesture will indeed make a difference to the breastfeeding cause in Africa. And if nothing else, the world's cross-nursers — long equated with wet nurses and made to feel shame for their hippie ways — suddenly have the most glamorous spokeswoman they could ever have imagined.