Salma Hayek Wet-Nurses in Africa

Actress Salma Hayek nursed a starving baby in front of an ABC News crew while on a trip to Sierra Leone in support of a tetanus vaccination project. She did this, she told the camera crew, in compassion for a starving child, but also to help lift a breastfeeding stigma in Africa, where men think that women cannot have sex while still nursing. "So the husbands, of course, of these women are really encouraging them to stop," Hayek said.

The mother of this baby boy is an obvious victim of this stigma. Hayek intervened with her emergency nursing because the mother simply had no milk. While the child, who was born the same day as Hayek's own daughter, will need a lot more nursing to make it safely out of infancy, Hayek's gesture could help relieve the African situation.

For those in the United States, Hayek has crossed many stigma lines as well. Cross-nursing or wet-nursing, in which one woman occasionally suckles another's baby, has long been considered a taboo in America. The later even denotes classism. Despite the taboo, cross-nursing has been on the rise. Nadya Suleman, mother of the octuplets, has been receiving breast milk donations to help feed her newborns.

Experts say that the cross-nursing taboo has nothing to do with class, but the safety of the mother and child. Even organizations that support sharing of breast milk do so conditionally, through the intermediary breast-pump. The Human Milk Banking Association of North America, which screens and distributes donated milk to hospitals across the U.S. and Canada, requires that its milk be pasteurized before distribution. The child Hayek nursed was reportedly healthy, and Hayek is reported to show no signs of illness.

No matter the outcome of Hayek's actions, the video has become an overnight internet sensation, reaching record views on YouTube. EW.com gave the clip its "biggest eyebrow-raiser" of the day award.