(RNS) — When the Rev. Kim Sue Jackson, a 41-year-old Episcopal priest and Georgia state senator, started browsing Facebook for breastmilk donors in the Atlanta area, she didn’t think religion would play much of a role in the effort. 

Over nine months, she drove through the state to pick up coolers full of breastmilk from mothers she met on the internet, to feed to her son, Khalil. Sometimes, the families giving away their excess breastmilk spoke about their gesture as an act of faith, she said.

One of the first openly gay priests of color in the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, Jackson’s search led her to cross paths with mothers and other Christians whose lifestyles and theologies differ from hers. She recalled picking up milk from families who homeschooled their children, viewed raising large families as their faith mission and whose mothers stayed home to tend to their families. Their decision to donate, she said, was born out of the desire to “be a blessing for other families.”

She said her drives through rural Georgia to pick up milk turned into “little moments of connection with people I would have never met otherwise, that we were able to build community around.” 

“It was really just the language that they used around like, ‘God has blessed me with this milk’ and in feeling like they had a responsibility to share it, and that it was a blessing to be able to do that,” Jackson told Religion News Service in an interview this week.

Now, Jackson, a Democrat who represents Georgia’s 41st district, is advocating for easier access to centralized milk banks, especially in rural areas. Still, though, she saw a religious silver lining in the outpouring of support from the strangers she met. 

“While it would have saved me so many hours … there was something really beautiful and holy about being able to connect one-on-one with all these different moms,” she said of opting for informal sharing rather than milk banks.

While the practice has existed for centuries, more parents turned to informal breast milk sharing during the 2022 baby formula shortage, according to reporting in The New York Times. The uptick was facilitated by the growth of Facebook groups like “Human Milk for Human Babies,” founded in 2010 by Emma Kwasnica, a breastmilk advocate from Montreal, Canada, that connect donors and parents and saw an increase in new users around that time. The virtual communities are run by volunteers, according to HM4HB’s website.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not recommend feeding babies milk obtained directly from individuals, citing safety risks from lack of screening, possible contamination and improper handling. 

Although data on the phenomenon is limited, a 2018 study found that 12% of American parents had donated milk, while 7% had fed their babies donated milk. Most do so to clear their stock, though many social media posts also mention wanting to help other families. And for parents who could end up spending between $16 and $20 on a 4 fluid-ounce milk bank bottle, the practice is also appealing from an economic perspective.

Although centralized, institutionalized milk bank systems can offer quick and easy — if costly — solutions for parents in need of milk, those who partake in informal sharing say it has created an opportunity for new parents to come together and share their birth stories. Through the process, as Jackson recalled, meeting in person also allows faith to pierce through, linking strangers around their shared postpartum moment and mutual aid. 

In 2023, Jackson and her wife, Trina, became the legal guardians of the 2-year-old son of a member of their church, Church of the Common Ground, which gathers in a downtown Atlanta park and primarily serves unhoused parishioners. 

“This is kind of an untraditional process,” Jackson said of how she became a mother. “It was a whirlwind.”

They were propelled into the internet ecosystem of breastmilk nine months later, after taking in their son’s newborn brother.

“My wife had always said a long time ago that if we ended up in a situation where it was us or foster care, we would always choose us for a little Black boy, and so that’s kind of where we found ourselves,” she said, adding their congregation and community pitched in with advice, prayers and baby essentials and helped the couple prepare for the children. Clergy even spent a retreat transforming their office into a child’s bedroom.

But Jackson recalls spending hours scrolling, posting and reacting to posts on Facebook groups like “Human Milk for Human Babies – GA” and “Eats on Feet Georgia” — which, respectively, boast 13,000 and 2,700 members — looking for potential milk donors.

She parsed through parents’ accounts of their children’s history, often detailing traumatic birth experiences, in the hope their stories would compel donors to reach out. Jackson retold the history of her son, who was born a month before he was full term, which resonated with many parents with similar labor experiences. “We just kind of led with that,” she said.

In some corners of social media where women mix motherhood with Christian lifestyle content, breastmilk donation has also become a trending topic.

Breanna Seibel, a 34-year-old nurse living in Wisconsin, is one of many creators on TikTok who promote donating breastmilk as a holy act of service, using the tags #Breastfeeding and #ChristianTok. 

Seibel’s twins were born three months premature in 2022. The eldest baby died after three days, while the other underwent a lifesaving heart surgery. As she began producing milk for both, she considered donating the surplus to others. In her small community, Seibel made a name for herself as a breastmilk donor as she answered donation calls on groups like Human Milk for Human Babies, she said.  

In late April, the content creator, facing the camera and leaning on her kitchen countertop, said to her 263,000 TikTok followers that though her faith was “greatly shaken” after giving birth to her twins, breastmilk donation helped her find a purpose that aligned with her faith values.

“I believe that we have found purpose through our pain through breast milk donation and helping other moms be able to keep their babies when I wasn’t able to keep mine,” she said in a recent Zoom interview with RNS, wearing a light blue cap reading “JESUS SAVES” and a diamond-encrusted cross necklace. 

Seibel, who also posts about her Catholic faith, added that donating has given her the opportunity to be “walking in Jesus’ footsteps.”

Rebecca Goldberg, a physical therapist from Decatur, Georgia, said she started donating during the COVID-19 pandemic — a time when people “were desperate for breast milk.” She’s also a friend of Jackson’s, and in their first month sourcing milk, Jackson and her wife relied on Goldberg to breastfeed their son.

Goldberg, who is Jewish, views donating primarily as a way to contribute positively to her community during a time of global hardship, but she also sees parallels between donating and the teachings of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who ranks giving to strangers among the highest levels of good deeds.

“In a Facebook forum, technically, I know them,” she said of families to whom she has donated. “But if I were to pass them on the street, I wouldn’t know who they were. I certainly wouldn’t know their children’s faces.”