The article addresses a number of issues related to the profession of wet nurses in pre-Revolutionary Russia. This topic is particularly relevant in connection with the current discussion of the alienation of women’s reproductive function. According to infant care manuals, while choosing a wet nurse, doctors recommended that mothers consider not only physical aspects, but also ethical issues. However, in practice, the ethics receded into the background. Wet nurses were used in almost all families that had reached a certain financial and social status.

Birth, suffering, disability, disease and death were by medicine’s successes placed within a context of seemingly novel challenges that cried out for new responses. Secular bioethics rose in response to the demands of these new biomedical technologies in the context of a culture fragmented in moral pluralism. While secular bioethics promised to unite persons separated by diverse religious and moral assumption, this is a promise that could not be fulfilled.