Salma Hayek told a heartwarming story about the time she decided to breastfeed a baby who didn’t belong to her.
The star of “Eternals,” who is now 56 years old and went to Sierra Leone in 2008, thought about the amazing moment while she was there. The incident took place there itself. Hayek was in the country on a UNICEF mission when she met a young mother taking care of a baby boy who was only a week old at the time.
After a camera crew finished filming the event, the video was shown on Nightline the following year. Hayek is seen sitting down with the young boy and feeding him in the video.
The song “From Dusk Till Dawn” can be heard in the video. “He was very hungry – I was weaning my daughter Valentina, but I still had a lot of milk, so I breast-fed the baby.”
Hayek had just finished weaning her 1-year-old daughter, whose birthday was the same as that of the 1-week-old baby boy.
“It was amazing because he’s really looking at me and he’s very little,” she says in the footage. “My baby is one year so she can suck a lot harder.”
Then she told what she was thinking when she made the gesture, saying “I thought about it, am I being disloyal to my child by giving my milk away? I actually think my baby would be very proud to be able to share her milk and when she grows up I will make sure she continues to share and be generous caring person.”
At the time, ABC News said that Sierra Leone had the world’s highest infant death rate. ABC News said at the time that Hayek wanted to get rid of the bad reputation that women often get for breastfeeding.
Nearly a decade later, when Hayek had to accept an award at the UNICEF Ball, she recalled the incident again.
Amazing. @salmahayek talks about breastfeeding another woman’s baby in Sierra Leone. @UNICEFUSA pic.twitter.com/jE88HToObp
— Marc Malkin (@marcmalkin) April 15, 2018
“This 15-year-old girl is sobbing and shaking with a newborn baby and she said, ‘Please help me. I need milk,'” Hayek told the audience. “We had so many things but we didn’t have milk – except I remembered that I had milk because I was weening my daughter.
“I just weened my daughter from breastfeeding not long ago and I said, ‘I got milk.’ I sat down and I breastfed this baby.'”
In 2018, Hayek said that she had been criticized for the kind thing she had done and that her publicist had even asked UNICEF not to release the picture of her with the baby.
“There was a lot of people that were upset I did that,” she told CBS News‘ John Blackstone.
Hayek has been known for her charity work since the 1980s. Today, through the Salma Hayek Foundation, she helps poor children living on the streets of Mexico and women who have been abused at home.
