Breast milk donations kept my tiny daughters alive

A drop of breast milk - enough to feed a kitten - fed one mother's twins, but formal support for donations is under-funded

I wanted to donate breast milk even before I had my now four-month-old daughter, Gallia, whose birth has made it possible. It is she, I suppose, who is performing the act of generosity, sharing her dinner with those not born so lucky. Gallia has recently acquired what I believe to be her fourth chin, and so she is in a position to be charitable. If that sounds smug, it isn't. I am grateful beyond measure that I have been able to feed her. It wasn't always thus.

Gallia's older sisters, my identical twin girls, Raffaella and Celeste, now aged three, were born 10 weeks early. They needed oxygen to breathe, an incubator to regulate their temperature, intravenous nutritional support and a nasal-gastric tube that dripped breast milk directly into their unready stomachs to sustain them in place of their lost umbilical cord. They weighed just a shade over 2lb each and they would spend 56 days in hospital before they were well enough to come home.