Woman offers breast-feeding service to gay parents

PARIS - A woman has posted an offer on a French website to breast-feed babies of homosexual male couples for 100 euros ($130) a day, stirring up media interest just weeks after a divisive same-sex marriage law was passed.

The post, which the website said it verified as 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 offer, addressed to male homosexual couples who can marry legally in France since May, promises up to 10 breast-feeds a day. The woman is mobile and based near Paris, it says.

Alexandre Woog, chief executive of the e-loue website where the offer appeared, said its staff had contacted the person and had no doubt about her identity and the seriousness of the proposal, nor the legality of the service proposed.

"Our legal advisers are sure of this. It's illegal in France to sell maternal milk but this is a person proposing a service, not selling the milk in flasks," Woog told Reuters.

While France has just joined more than a dozen countries to legalize marriage and adoption of children by same-sex couples, it does not permit surrogacy or assisted reproduction for gay and lesbian couples. ?

Reuters was unable to independently confirm the authenticity of the French breast-feed offer or the identity of the person behind it, who said in response to queries via the website that many people had replied to the proposal.

"I've received more than a dozen requests, but only half of them were serious. The rest were from perverts," the poster of the offer, run like all adverts under a pseudonym, said in an exchange with Reuters.

Woog said his website, created in 2009 as a platform where users can offer or hire anything legal online, checks any posts that raise eyebrows.

The breast-feeding offer was the second major eyecatcher since the website was founded, he said. Another user previously offered to rent out two goats as lawn-cutters.