Human breast milk has become a new luxury for China’s rich, with some firms offering wet-nurse services, a report said, provoking outrage and disgust among Web users yesterday.
Xinxinyu, a domestic staff agency in the booming city of Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, provided wet nurses for newborns, the sick and other adults who pay high prices for the milk’s fine nutrition, the Southern Metropolis Daily said.
“Adult [clients] can drink it directly through breastfeeding, or they can always drink it from a breast pump if they feel embarrassed,” the report quoted company owner Lin Jun as saying.
Wet nurses serving adults are paid about 16,000 yuan (US$2,610) a month — more than four times the Chinese average — and those who are “healthy and good looking” can earn even more, the report said.
Traditional beliefs in some parts of China hold that human breast milk has the best and most easily digestible nutrition for people who are ill.
However, the report sparked heated debate in the media and on Chinese social media, with most users condemning the service as unethical.
“This adds to China’s problem of treating women as consumer goods and the moral degradation of China’s rich,” Cao Baoyin, a writer and regular commentator in various Chinese media, said on his blog.
Xinxinyu has been ordered to suspend its operations and had its business license revoked for multiple reasons, including missing three years of annual checks, regulators in Shenzhen said on Thursday, although the wet-nurse service was not among the factors they cited.
Company officials could not be reached for comment.
There were nearly 140,000 postings on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblog, on the topic by yesterday afternoon.
In an online poll, almost 90 percent of participants voted against the service, saying it “violated ethical values,” while a fraction over 10 percent deemed it a “normal business practice.”
“People become perverts when they are too rich and tired of other forms of entertainment. This is disguised pornography,” a user with the online handle ricky_gao said.
White Lotus, another weibo writer, said: “Please do not force motherhood to lose its grace and become ridiculous.”
Other postings voiced cynical approval.
“It’s just a business, nothing to blame it for,” A Xiao Shuai said. “People are insensitive about ethics when there is money on the table.”
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
DIVERSIFY: While Japan already has plentiful access to LNG, a pipeline from Alaska would help it move away from riskier sources such as Russia and the Middle East Japan is considering offering support for a US$44 billion gas pipeline in Alaska as it seeks to court US President Donald Trump and forestall potential trade friction, three officials familiar with the matter said. Officials in Tokyo said Trump might raise the project, which he has said is key for US prosperity and security, when he meets Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for the first time in Washington as soon as next week, the sources said. Japan has doubts about the viability of the proposed 1,287km pipeline — intended to link fields in Alaska’s north to a port in the south, where
RSS