A Muslim legal expert on Thursday afternoon will sign a religious ruling that will give Muslim families in Minnesota the OK to use donor breast milk for their vulnerable babies while in intensive care.
The religious clarification, forged over the past few months in discussions between Minnesota health systems and Islamic faith leaders, is believed to be the first of its kind in the United States.
Health providers had noticed Muslim mothers would refuse donor breast milk due to concerns over Islamic law and kinship. Supporters say the clarity from the new decree, or fatwa, may save lives.
“Muslim families would not accept it, due to their spiritual beliefs, even when it was available, and medically advised by their doctors,” Linda Dech, executive director of Minnesota Milk Bank for Babies, said of donated breast milk.
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“We wanted to see what we could do to ensure these infants have the same access to best practices that prevents serious illness that other infants receive,” she added.
Donor milk in the U.S. is anonymous, so families were concerned about having an unknown relationship that could result in religiously incestuous relationships in the future.
In the Islamic faith, a person who breastfeeds a baby develops a kinship with that baby. Children’s Minnesota neonatologist Dr. Leah Jordan found that her Muslim patients would often refuse donor breast milk because they were concerned about developing unknown relationships.
A discussion earlier in October with Islamic leaders at the Minnesota Milk Bank for Babies in Golden Valley, Minn.
Courtesy photo
For pregnant people who delivered prematurely and had babies needing immediate intensive care, the concerns bordered on crisis.
“Families, when they have this concern, have expressed that they really want guidance from their imam, from their local community and from their religion before they choose to use donor breast milk,” said Jordan, who helped start the conversations that led to Thursday’s formal decree. “They need that question to be answered.”
“Like most of our moms that deliver early, they have trouble securing that milk,” said Dr. Nancy Fahim, a neonatal specialist at M Health Fairview in Minneapolis. “They want the best for their babies, but they’re wanting to stay in connection with their religion. So we tried to look for that, how to solve that problem.”