Wet nursing–e.g., breast feeding another’s person’s baby–used to be a necessity when the mother died or didn’t produce milk. More recently, in the West, many considered it demeaning. Now, with gay men having IVF babies through paid and volunteer surrogates, it’s apparently about to make a comeback as a paid profession. From the Sky News story:

A woman is offering to breastfeed babies of male gay parents for 100 euros (£86) a day. The post, which the ‘e-loue’ website said is genuine and legal, reads: “I am a young mother in perfect health, a trained nurse of 29, and I am renting my breasts to milk-feed infants.” The woman promises up to 10 breastfeeds a day, and adds that she is mobile and based near Paris.

As I have been saying, we are instrumentalizing (or in this example, reinstrumentalizing) the reproductive, gestational, and maternal parts and functions of the female body. Everything old is new again.