CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – A woman who doesn’t want her breast milk to go to waste has taken out a newspaper ad in hopes of selling it. Martha Heller, 22, of Tiffin, took out the ad in The Gazette, offering 100 ounces of her breast milk for $200 or the best offer.

Heller said her freezer is overflowing with breast milk that she has pumped since August. Her 4-month-old daughter won’t drink from a bottle and the supply is piling up.

Heller now donates to the University of Iowa’s Mother’s Milk Bank, but the 100 ounces of milk she wants to sell was pumped before going through the screening process for the bank and cannot be donated.

Linda Klein, a lactation consultant at Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids, said breast milk can generally be stored in a freezer for up to six months.

Heller said she researched laws regarding the sale of breast milk and couldn’t find any in Iowa.

Don McCormick, a spokesman for the Iowa Department of Public Health, said he was not aware of any laws in Iowa restricting the sale of breast milk, but that state health officials advised against it.

Heller said she hasn’t received any legitimate calls about her ad.

“There was one prank caller,” she said.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Watch-maker and clothier Fossil Inc. agreed to pay $3,600 to a woman who was barred from breast-feeding her infant while visiting a company showroom, the New York Civil Liberties Union said on Tuesday.

Lass King, 37, a buyer for a Maine clothing store and a mother of two, said she received a letter of apology and the payment from Fossil after threatening the company with a lawsuit.

In its letter to King, Fossil also said it had issued a policy affirming that breast-feeding was permitted in all Fossil stores and showrooms, said Galen Sherwin, director of the NYCLU’s Reproductive Rights Project.

Representatives of Fossil could not immediately confirm details of the settlement.

New York law states that women are permitted to breast-feed “in any location, public or private, where the mother is otherwise authorized to be.”

The case follows another settlement, reached in September, when the Toys R Us toy store chain agreed to lift its restrictions on where a woman can breast-feed.

King called her experience humiliating.

In August 2006, while meeting with a salesperson in a Manhattan showroom, King was told she was making others feel uncomfortable by breast-feeding her 8-month-old son, Cody.

King was taken to another floor to finish feeding Cody but was then not allowed back into the showroom. In January, as she made plans to again visit a Fossil showroom, she was told by a Fossil representative that breast-feeding was forbidden.

“I wanted to be apologized to. I wanted not to be humiliated or for anybody else to be humiliated either,” she told Reuters of her decision to contact the civil liberties organization.

CAIRO (Reuters) – Cairo’s al-Azhar Islamic University on Monday suspended a lecturer who suggested that men and women work colleagues could use symbolic breastfeeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together.

The lecturer, Ezzat Atiya, had drawn on Islamic traditions which forbid sexual relations between a man and a woman who has breastfed him to suggest that symbolic breastfeeding could be a way around strict segregation of males and females.

But after controversy in the Egyptian and Middle East media, university president Ahmed el-Tayeb suspended Atiya pending an urgent investigation into his opinions, the Egyptian state news agency MENA reported.

Atiya is the head of the department which deals with sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and the university is part of the al-Azhar institute, one of the most prestigious in Sunni Islam.

Atiya’s unusual opinion was widely publicized by Arabic-language satellite television channels and featured in a discussion in the Egyptian parliament.

The Dubai-based channel Al Arabiya quoted him as saying that after five breastfeedings the man and woman could be alone together without violating Islamic law and the woman could remove her headscarf to reveal her hair.

But a committee from al-Azhar said his proposal contradicted the principles of Islam and of morality.

Atiya had said he had drawn on medieval scholarship to justify his position. The opposition party newspaper al-Ahrar on Monday quoted him as saying he retracted his views because they were based on the opinions of a minority of scholars.

TOKYO (Reuters) – Plans to urge Japanese mothers to breast-feed and sing lullabies to their babies and for families to turn off the TV during meals have been scrapped, Kyodo news agency reported.

Mothers were urged to look into their baby’s eyes while breast-feeding in a draft of a report by a government panel that was due out this week.

It had also warned that the Internet and mobile phones give children a “direct connection with the evils of the world.”

But the release of the report by an education reform panel was called off at the last minute in an apparent response to criticism that it went too far in meddling with people’s private lives, Kyodo reported.

Improving education has also been a priority in efforts to boost Japan’s faltering birthrate. The fertility rate — the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime — hit a record low of 1.26 in 2005.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged when he took office last year to reform Japan’s education system by reviving patriotism in the nation’s classrooms.

The education system came under fire earlier this year after a series of student suicides linked to bullying, and parliament enacted a law in December aimed at encouraging schools to teach patriotism.

MANILA (Reuters) – About 10,000 mothers gathered on Wednesday in nearly 300 state and private hospitals, day-care centres and parks across the Philippines to raise awareness of breastfeeding and try to set a Guinness record for the event.

Only 16 percent of mothers in the Philippines were practising breastfeeding, an extraordinarily low rate for a poor country, said the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which warned of serious health risks for infants.

“Breastfeeding is on the decline in the Philippines,” Dale Rutstein, UNICEF’s chief of communications, told Reuters at an open-air basketball court in Manila, where more than 1,000 mothers took part in the simultaneous breastfeeding.

Nearly 9,000 women were taking part in the event elsewhere across the archipelago, aiming to set a Guinness record for the most number of mothers simultaneously breastfeeding their children. Guinness were to rule on the record attempt in three weeks.

UNICEF said breastfeeding provided the required nutrition for babies, and also reduced the risks of exposing them to diseases arising from unhygienic preparation of infant formula.

“It’s a beautiful way to relate to my child,” Elvira Henares Esguerra, a dermatologist and mother of a five-year-old boy, told Reuters.

“It’s not only food, it’s not only the perfect food for any infant from zero to six months, but the perfect milk for any child.