to ask you to STOP using these unhelpful phrases?

[StopCallingMeTeresa]

i apologise if this turns into an essay, but...

"Supply equals demand"
or
(worse) "low milk supply is actually quite rare so probably not your problem"

I've just read yet another MN thread where someone said the 2nd one (basically suggesting that a poster with suspected low milk supply probably wasn't in the "tiny tiny" %age of women who don't produce enough milk). It fucks me right off to keep reading this nonsense on here and other breastfeeding support groups/forums because it makes women feel like their actions or perception of low milk supply are the cause... rather than a genuine medical issue which might never be fixed. If a man had erectile dysfunction caused by a non-mental health issue, would we tell him that the problem wasn't a real problem if only he'd try the right thing, mentally?

Personally, this is (obviously) an upsetting issue. I'm 2 months PP and have low milk supply; as in, I produce about 5ml per 1hr pumping session, and I can get about 30ml on an entire day's worth of hours and hours of being hooked up to a pump inbetween breastfeeds.

My baby was delivered and within 48hrs lost so much weight he was admitted into NICU for monitoring. He was shrieking with hunger when he wasn't latched on, whcih was hours and hours of every day - i got about 3hrs of sleep in the first three days of his life, after which i was pretty much told he was in such a risky position we HAD to start supplementing with formula. My baby was literally starving.

• I'm on domperidone to increase milk supply (dr is talking about stopping it now as it has had no affect).
• I've spent every day of his life on a double hospital grade pump.
• Oatmeal breakfasts, flapjacks to inrease milk. I feel sick thinking about oats these days i'm so sick of them.
• I've taken fistfuls and handfuls of supplements every day: goat's rue to develop milk ducts, fenugreek, brewer's yeast, you name it, for 2 solid months.
• I've tackled slow let down by doing extreme skin to skin kangaroo style care the last few weeks; I listen to relaxing music whilst feeding and pumping, smelling my baby and looking at him/pictures of him.

His latch has been checked. No tongue tie.

• I've done about 4 feeding "resets" where I sat in bed and did nothing but skin to skin and feed for 3 days straight while my boyfriend and mum ran around doing everything else.
• i've had other stuff like bottle feed technique checked at my local LLL group, as well as the health visitor.
• GP has checked my thyroid and prolactin levels twice now - all normal.
• We've done a weighted feed at the local support group but i'm simply not producing anywhere near normal levels of breastmilk.

There's NOTHING i can do now to ever exclusively breastfeed as intended. i simply don't produce enough milk for some reason.

... and yet i keep reading on here especially that "low milk supply is rare" (no scientific source or attributation, of course!) and "supply=demand", just like all the other lies i was told at the antenatal group about breastfeeing.

can i ask you to consider the impact on women like me the next time you are writing something like that?

by washing over what is a genuinely distressing problem as if it weren't a real problem, it doesn't contribute towards good maternal mental health and suggests it can be fixed.

sometimes, it can't.

and now i'm trying to accept that it's ok. but then i read BF support threads on here with misleading / ambiguous phrases like that and i struggle.

There are many things written on this site that MN doesn't actually 'support' Kitty. Your first two paras are absolutely right though.

Breastfeeding, or not, is a subject which needs more wisdom and compassion all round.

Thank you Errol - my point (badly made perhaps) is that words matter - the use of gestapo and mafia is reinforcing the idea that anyone who advocates breastfeeding is a mass murdering psychopath whereas those anti breastfeeding are all entirely rational. Having breastfed one child but not the other I don’t feel it is unreasonable to say that breastfeeding should be the default but sadly the UK others it and provides woefully poor levels of support and education.

@Refilona👏👏👏

The problem is that there are women who have low supply- and with the best will in the world, and the most effort in the world it can’t be fixed. Like you, OP. And there are other women who think, or who are told that they have low supply, but who don’t- or even if they do it’s fixable. We somehow have to find a way of distinguishing, so that women in the first category can be supported to accept that it’s never going to work, and stop exhausting themselves and making themselves miserable by carrying on, and where women in the second category can be supported over the temporary issue. Ir’s really difficult. I don’t know they answer.

@BertrandRussell exactly.

I do know, however, that anyone who is told they have low supply in the first 3 days post partum is being horribly misinformed. And this seems to be happening more and more.

the use of gestapo and mafia is reinforcing the idea that anyone who advocates breastfeeding is a mass murdering psychopath whereas those anti breastfeeding are all entirely rational.

I disagree with this. As a woman who was fortunate enough to be able to breastfeed both DC with very little fuss or bother, and who absolutely advocates breastfeeding, there's definitely a "type" of woman who breastfeeds who sees it as "better" if you like, and carries herself with a level of smugness not seen in every breastfeeding woman. And it's that smugness, with a hint of unkindness just under the surface whereby any woman who doesn't breastfeed is deemed lazy, or inept, or simply substandard, that makes other women use phrases like "mafia".

You can deny those women exist. I've met some of them, attended NCT groups with them, spent time at baby classes with them. And some are arseholes. So that language might be provocative, but I don't take umbrage with it because it's not pointed towards me; I have friends who've breastfed, friends who've formula fed and unless they've directly asked for my advice, I've smiled and let them do their thing because I don't believe pressurising women to try breastfeeding helps anyone.

FudgeBrownie2019 OK well call them smug, rude or many other things then. The Gestapo were part of a regime who murdered millions to casually use this term is massively disrespectful to those killed (and their families) and minimises the horror of the holocaust. It is not a helpful phrase.

FudgeBrownie2019 Im not denying there are arseholes who push breastfeeding unhelpfully - there are arseholes in many aspects of life sadly.

Mumsnet have removed the post referencing the gestapo- thank you Mumsnet HQ

“here's definitely a "type" of woman who breastfeeds who sees it as "better" if you like, and carries herself with a level of smugness not seen in every breastfeeding woman. And it's that smugness, with a hint of unkindness just under the surface whereby any woman who doesn't breastfeed is deemed lazy, or inept, or simply substandard, that makes other women use phrases like "mafia"”

The problem is that words like this are used so often and with so little evidence that women are often hesitant to offer bf advice or even a positive personal anecdote for fear of being accused of smugness or being a member of the breastapo. The very fact that you felt you had to say that you were “fortunate enough” to be able to bf rather makes the point.

It’s utterly shit if you want to bf but there are unfixable medical reasons why you can’t. It’s also shit (differently shit, but still shit) if you want to but can’t for reasons that are fixable but nobody shows you how to fix them. But we have to treat these two different categories of women differently. And the fact remains that the vast majority of women can bf. It’s up to them whether they want to or not- but in as many cases as possible it needs to be a proper choice. Not one women are forced into because they have been given inadequate support and crap information.

Thank you Bertrand you’ve expressed it far better then me!

My first two were breastfed - it was a nightmare - I never had enough milk and had hungry screaming babies and raw nipples. I ploughed on due to examples of other mums who found it easy and my own mother who despite having an A cup to my C - was as previous poster said, literally involuntarily squirting it across the room!
With DC3 I tried for a month and he screamed and screamed, I used to walk for hours to keep him asleep hoping that enough milk would build up for a feed.
Mum commented that he was the most miserable baby she’d ever met. I got thrush on my nipples and his mouth and switched to bottle - both me and my miserable baby We’re transformed overnight to happy, relaxed and we’ll fed individuals. At last I could enjoy my baby without being controlled by guilt and angst.
It may be rare to have not enough milk - maybe you are a rarity, maybe I was. All I know is that I didn’t have enough and switching was the best move I made. With no 4 I did both from the start and didn’t stress - it was great, a great Wright lifted.

@Toomuchtrouble4me do you feel you got all the help and support you needed?

Totally agree fudgebrownie

I’d rather women just be honest and say breastfeeding wasn’t for them than lie and say they didn’t have enough milk.

The reality is, most women will make enough milk to satisfy their baby. Pre-formula your baby would likely die if you didn’t, your body is designed to feed your baby. I do think a lot of it is misinformation. I remember when my DC1 was born and my Mother (who never attempted to BF) basically said he clearly wasn’t having enough breast milk hence wanting to feed all of the time. She insisted I try formula but I just didn’t want to so I persevered. Even the midwife said I should try mixed feeding ffs, I was adamant I didn’t want to. He thrived on my milk as all of my children have.

My youngest lost 12% of his birth weight so the midwife insisted we get him checked over in hospital despite me telling her breastfed babies do generally lose more weight at first and are slower to regain it. The consultant demanded I give him formula which I refused so she insisted I pump a certain amount of milk instead before we go home. It’s hard to pump to begin with, most women struggle to pump at first. I managed it though eventually and gave him it, all of that stress just to prove I was making enough milk . He’s 9 months old now and 99th centile, still mostly breastfed.

If your baby is feeding around the clock that is normal, it doesn’t mean they need formula top ups at all. Likewise if they are slow to regain weight after birth or lose slightly more than the recommended 10%, it’s normal. There’s almost definitely nothing wrong with your supply, newborns just want to feed a lot and they digest BM quicker than formula.

So women who say they didn’t have enough milk are lying. Lovely.

Pre-formula your baby would likely die if you didn’t, your body is designed to feed your baby

As indeed many babies did.

Pre-formula your baby would likely die if you didn’t, your body is designed to feed your baby.

For the umpteenth time - there is no designer, there is no design. Evolution functions as a kind of sieve, weeding out species (acts at whole species level, not at individual level) that perform less well than their competitor species. If 50% or even 99% of offspring die (which they do in some species - see, for instance sea turtle eggs hatching on a million and one nature programmes, then having to run the gauntlet of crabs, seagulls, dehydration, etc. etc. on the way to the water) that doesn't matter, so long as more of them survive that their competitor species for the same evolutionary niche.

And evolution is a trade off. If there really was a designer for the human body who'd produced the female reproductive system, I'd sue. Pelvises too small, babies born at ridiculously early stage of gestation and thus ridiculously dependent on their mothers compared to most mammal species, putting both mother and baby in a position of intense vulnerability... but the trade off is bigger heads with bigger brains and an upright stance allowing us to use tools.

So can we put to bed this fucking annoying myth that "women are designed to feed babies"? They are not designed. Some of the time feeding works out okay (if it didn't the species would tank), but not all the time. And the truth of the matter is we don't know how often it doesn't.

But don't automatically assume that those of us saying we did not produce enough milk are lying. My DS (now mercifully a strapping 11 year old) fell below the 1 in a thousand level on the weight charts, despite me feeding on demand, feeding round the clock, even setting an alarm to do night time feeds (because actually he was, by that stage, too fucking weak to even cry for milk). There. was. no. milk.

“So women who say they didn’t have enough milk are lying. Lovely”
Yep. Some of them are. Because they feel that is a socially acceptable reason for not wanting to bf. Which is crap. Not wanting to bf should be a socially acceptable reason for not wanting to bf. Some women don’t have enough milk and they could try 24 hours a day and still wouldn’t.Some women do, but feel as if they haven’t because the process of getting milk to baby isn’t working. A fixable problem which there should be enough people and resources to fix.

And how, Bertrand, do you tell the difference between those of us "lying" about not enough milk and those of us telling the truth? Pray tell. Because I can assure you being on the receiving end of accusations of lying/ not trying hard enough are pretty fucking painful when you've tried your damndest to feed. (In fact it reminds me uncomfortably of the sort of misogynist newspaper article which says "well, of course some women really do get raped, but some lie about it to cover up adultery/loss of virginity/etc - insert misogynist trope of choice here." It's yet another socially sanctioned refusal to listen to what women are telling you about their actual experiences.)

Also, where is the peer reviewed research for this "only 1%" figure which keeps being bandied around? (Not aimed at you specifically, Bertrand, but it's a figure which keeps popping up on these threads, and I'd love to know where it comes from). I stand by my hunch that there's actually far more research into low milk yield in dairy cattle than there is into low milk yield in women.

Pre-formula your baby would likely die if you didn’t, your body is designed to feed your baby

In that era, many of us with PCOS (no one who has RTFT can have failed to notice the numbers in this self-selected sample ) would not have had a baby at all.

I do know, however, that anyone who is told they have low supply in the first 3 days post partum is being horribly misinformed.

I don't agree - at least not in the case of women who for medical reasons this is more likely to be true. It would have helped me enormously to know from the off that I might find it a bit harder than the norm, that the fact I needed to supplement a bit wasn't because I was doing anything wrong. Maybe the pcos link wasn't widely known 20 years ago, I found it on an early parenting forum.

The word I'd use for the smug, oxymoronic ignorant know-it-alls would be 'zealot' or 'evangelical'.

Jesus Christ!

... Medical professionals alarmed at baby losing so much Weight while exclusive bf that baby gets admitted to intensive care (baby becoming unresponsive due to starvation, dehydration, stroke risk).
... A weighted feed being performed by experts who confirmed virtually no milk transfer despite good latching & no tongue tie
... Consultant confirming supply issues to the point they prescribed an off license use of Domperidone..

And still here come comments about the supply is fine... And to trust the body will provide!!

Following that advice = dead baby!!

Gas lighting

Literally 0 milk here, pretty much formula 100% after a week.

We just shrugged our shoulders and moved on, what is what is and that’s it.

Personally I think you were mad to go through so much intervention and personal discomfort just to try and breastfeed. Formula isn’t poison.