LANSING – Less than a year after signing a contract with the Department of Corrections, Mama’s Mobile Milk, a transportation service that provides babies with their incarcerated mothers’ breast milk, may be forced to shut down under legislative budget plans that would end state funding of the Breast Milk Program.
The House and Senate have passed different versions of the budget for the 12 months that begin Oct. 1 but both versions would eliminate money for the program that serves women in prison.
Currently, Corrections partners with Mama’s Mobile Milk, located in Metro Detroit, and provides funding for a $500,000 program that provides breast milk to babies of post-partum prisoners.
Mama’s Mobile Milk started doing that work, uncompensated, in the community for about a year and a half to two years ago, according to Angelene Love. Love is the human milk transport coordinator for the program.
She said that the idea was born out of Sekeita Lewis-Johnson and Mia Roetherford of the Southeast Michigan IBCLCs of Color, who as nurses, saw firsthand that “lots of Black and brown babies were being separated from their birthing parent due to either a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit stay for low birth weight or because of Child Protective Services involvement after birth.”
IBCLC stands for International Board-Certified Lactation Consultants.
“We first wanted it to be for babies who were in the NICU, babies who were in Child Protective Services care,” Love said.
“If there was a custodial agreement where there was no contact [between the mother and her newborn], that’s where we are doing that work in that space. But we were getting a lot of inquiries for families who had a mother in jail and were trying to get the milk out of the jail,” she said.
“And so we were like, ‘Wow,’ this is a whole other need and a whole other space we didn’t know we needed to support,” Love said.
“We started with the prison system in November of 2024, when we signed a contract with the Department of Corrections that really surpassed what our dreams ever were for Mama’s Mobile Milk working in the system,” Love said.
Love said that it was April of this year when the program did its first transport.
“There’s been at least eight pregnant women in this facility in just the past six months,” she said, referring to the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, the only prison in Michigan that houses women.
“If the caregiver and the infant are within two hours of the prison, we drive it. We have a transporter pick that [milk] up every day and drive it to the infant. Then if it is over two hours, then we have a transporter pick it up, they bring it to me, and I ship that to the caregiver and they receive it through the mail,” Love said.
“People who are less fortunate already face greater challenges, and when we cut programs like this, it makes it harder for them to give their child the highest standard of care,” said Laura Appel.
Appel is the executive vice president of government relations and public policy at the Michigan Health & Hospital Association in Okemos, which represents community hospitals in the state.
Love said, “If funding was to be removed for the program, the program is completely gone. The current participants that we have now, it would just be devastating to them. This is the only way that they are able to connect with their baby.”
“We do not believe at this point that the department will still allow us to provide this service if there wasn’t funding included,” she said. That is “because the funding also supports the correction staff to do their job and for them to make sure that when we come to pick up the milk, it can come out. It does pay for their staff time, too,” she said.
Lauren Leeds, the public information officer for the State Budget Office, said, “We’re continuing ongoing negotiations and we’re hopeful that we’ll have a deal in place by the deadline.”
The House, Senate and governor’s office face a Sept. 30 deadline to agree on a budget.
Without continued state funding, Love said, “We would make this program happen if we had to make it happen for free because that’s what we do. That’s how we show up. But we can’t do that if we don’t have the explicit legislation to make it happen.”
