To think that "97% of women can breastfeed" is a load of crap

[elliejjtiny]

I've been seeing this phrase a lot over the years, about how 97% of women can breastfeed and all the rest of the people who say they can't just need support.

I would guess that 97% of women can probably produce milk (although I wouldn't be surprised if it was lower) but there is so much more to breastfeeding than the mum producing milk which never seem to be mentioned. Mums with disabilities/medical conditions, babies with disabilities/medical conditions, babies who are born prematurely, mums separated from their babies and mums on medication that means they can't breastfeed.

When people gaily spout that 97% of women can breastfeed I find is so annoying and inaccurate. It's usually the same people who want the number of c-sections reduced as well and think that everyone can give birth with no interventions, they just need to stay mobile and ignore the nasty doctors.

Is it? My experience (so anecdotal) for my children was quick acceptance for giving up breastfeeding quickly and perfectly fine to move onto formula too easily. Non demonising of formula that I saw. Mixed feeding needs more discussion - totally agree.

Honestly? This type of comment is hurtful. It does suggest that there’s not enough effort being made by non-breastfeeding mothers. I breastfed my infant son. Had loads of support. He lost a dangerous amount of weight and I was told to give him formula. Supplemented his formula by pumping. Was sitting on the pump for hours and would end up with c.30ml of milk.
technically I could breast feed. However, no one will now convince me that fed is best is anything other than right.

The scaremongering is hugely prevalent and the prevailing either or stance is ridiculous.

Partly because more up to date research shows links between conditions like PCOS and breastfeeding difficulties, so it's also possible that if we go way back, mothers who would have struggled to breastfeed might also have struggled to conceive. Plus, there are environmental factors - various sources of hormone disruption - that would not have existed thousands of years ago.

This is an interesting point. We know that there are mother/baby dyads now that would never have existed until pretty recently. Populations in an industrial, medically advanced society aren't going to be the same as those in hunter gatherer or earlier agrarian ones.

Well that’s a medical degree awarded that needs reconsidering!

A lot of those factors like disability/poorly baby don’t “count” in that figure though - it’s saying 97% of women are physiologically able to breastfeed, circumstances may mean they can’t or choose not to but it doesn’t mean they are incapable of producing enough milk to sustain a baby, especially with good support

. Mums with disabilities/medical conditions, babies with disabilities/medical conditions, babies who are born prematurely, mums separated from their babies and mums on medication that means they can't breastfeed.

Dd was prem & in hospital so we were separated. I still managed to breastfeed.

I think the bit most people struggle with isn't milk supply, or the stuff above.

Its milk storage capacity and imho its the bit not talked about enough. For some people, they absolutely can produce "enough milk", but their breast storage capacity is small, so their baby is going to want to feed very regularly. This is often confused for poor milk supply when in fact its more that there simply isn't as much in one go.

If you are in this camp, it might be really exhausting trying to feed almost hourly in that first 6 months where breastmilk is the babies only source of food. Its probably not going to work without you co-sleeping and having a lot of family support. In the past or in a traditional close knit community where a woman's mum/aunties are on hand to help with cooking & caring for other DC might probably be ok. In a modern set up, less so.

If you are really well informed about this and determined, you might soldier through knowing its likely to get easier when baby starts solids and breastmilk gradually shifts to being more about immunity & comfort than the sole source of nutrition.

Then the other thing I wish lactation consultants were more honest about. Your breastmilk supply regulates in the first 3 months or so. After this, for many women its well nigh impossible to materially increase from the level it regulates to. If it drops a bit at some point because baby is ill and feeds less, you can get it back up to that regulated level, but its much harder without medication to recover to a much higher level than you ever had. So if you got off to a rough start and maybe had a tiny prem baby, or mixed fed or did bottles at night, and your supply settles at a lower level, after 3 or 4 months its incredibly hard to significantly increase it, even if you power pump, feed the baby loads.

Also often the way you "increase" the supply is feeding the baby the same volume but more often, whereas what most people want is for the baby to take a bigger feed and then last a couple of hours.

My breastfeeding days are long over, but I only recently learned something that explained so much to me, which is that humans are different from many mammals in that feeding needs to be learned, both by the mother and the baby. Unlike puppies and kittens, human babies don't really know how to do it, or at least not effectively. And that's why many women fail: if nobody teaches the mother how to do it, she may well not manage by herself. It's a skill, not instinct.

So what often happens is that women are no longer surrounded by other experienced women who have already breast fed, so it's like asking someone to just know how to ride a bike while also telling her she's a useless mother if she falls off. No wonder women fail.

(I was very lucky, because the woman in the bed next to me helped me for my first. If she hadn't, I don't think the help I got from the maternity would have been much use. Once you can do it, it's generally much easier for subsequent babies.)

I think 97% is about right tbh. Until very recently (in evolutionary terms) there was a huge selective pressure to be able to feed your baby and the genes of those that couldn't tended to disappear.

These days, just because you can doesn't mean you should have to as a suitable alternative exists.

My first baby with into NICU, because I could not get there the first night they fed the baby from a cup as they knew I wanted to breastfeed. I'll be forever grateful to the nurse who did this for me, a stranger. I donated breast milk to the other babies. The main consultant demonstrated to a student doctor the strength of my baby before we left 10 days later because of the power of breast feeding.

The teaching hospital had a whole support system in place to encourage and help women breast feed. They had another who came to teach me how to wash the baby and how to change a nappy etc. It is not the UK or Ireland as I live on the continent. In my experience, UK & Irish women are the least likely to breastfeed. And in my experience of Mumsnet you cannot have a reasonable discussion on breast v bottle.

If you are in this camp, it might be really exhausting trying to feed almost hourly in that first 6 months where breastmilk is the babies only source of food. Its probably not going to work without you co-sleeping and having a lot of family support. In the past or in a traditional close knit community where a woman's mum/aunties are on hand to help with cooking & caring for other DC might probably be ok. In a modern set up, less so.

And perhaps another lactating woman with greater storage capacity helping you out with a few bigger feeds here and there so you can get more of a bloc of rest. That's probably happened a fair bit over the course of our history.

I went into shock due to blood loss when I gave birth to my daughter and did not produce any milk at all because of this, not a drop. Several hours after I had her the midwife checked her levels and said she needed milk immediately and it has to be formula.
Once I had been moved out of HDU to a normal ward the lady next to me was getting a lecture about how she would be failing her baby if she didn’t breast feed….. my midwife went mad at her!!

I can't stand breastfeeding zealots. I produced milk but it was a pitiful amount and no way I could have fed baby just with that. Rather than be a breastfed-at-all-costs martyr, I combo fed and then stopped it.

You posted this while I was posting, but yes, this is absolutely the sort of way that women end up being set up to fail: they're told they don't have enough milk, or the baby will die if you sleep alongside it, and yet you don't have anyone else to help with all the other things that need to be done, so it all becomes impossible. Breastfeeding needs to be frequent but short for the first days or even weeks, and that's hard to fit in around other activities, especially when you don't have a lot of support - preferably female!

Yeah it’s interesting. Combination feeding is a ‘better’ message to those women who can’t produce enough. They are still breastfeeding but they are topping up. Giving anything by breast is brilliant (in this context) and if more is needed that’s fine.

I add those to the can’t be asked to breastfeed because I then can’t drink (some of my NCT group), think it’s too icky (family member!, or don’t want my breasts to sag (good friend).

Formula is a money making business. Breastfeeding doesn't make these companies money!

In the 70s Nestle aggressively promoted formula in 3rd world countries. Many people used formula instead of breastfeeding, they couldn't afford the formula, the water used was unclean, their own milk dried up and many babies died.

I know!!! I would have breast fed all mine past 6 weeks if I was helped to combination feed as opposed to being told it’s impossible and my milk would instantly disappear!

None of this changes the fact that I needed formula because I had no milk.

During much of the past, about a third of babies died before their fifth birthday. Obviously, there were many causes for this high childhood mortality but we can't say that the survival of the human race means that all mothers and babies were able to manage life ideally without modern inventions. The human race survived because people had very large families, so that some of their children survived to grow up.

Moreover, before formula, there were some babies who only survived because of some form of wet-nursing.

It's fine to say that it didn't work out for you, but not accurate in most cases to say that you were biologically incapable of doing so.

My friend and I had babies around the same time. Mine latched in the first 20 minutes and breastfeeding was a breeze- she gained weight easily, fed efficiently, I had no issues or nipple soreness.

Hers had jaundice. He had to be woken every few hours to feed as he would happily sleep through from birth and was losing weight. He had to be coaxed to take the breast. She had to do triple feeding- 20 minutes on the breast, 20 minutes on the bottle (usually a bit of expressed and a bit of formula) and then 20 minutes of expressing for the next feed just to be able to get him to take enough calories. She had thrush and eczema on her nipples. If she'd said, "I don't want to do this anymore," no-one would have judged, she'd have been considered to have done her absolute best, but she had decided that she was going to breastfeed him by hook or by crook, did a ton of research and, importantly, when she sought support from infant feeding, she got it.

90% of women in her position would have said that they "couldn't" breastfeed and stopped, and that would quite possibly have been the best option for them, but it goes to show that most of them COULD. Whether it's worth it is a choice for the mother.

I breastfed both my DC. I never doubted that I would be able to and I chose to breastfeed as the easier option - I am a bit obsessive - knowing that messing around with bottles would drive me nuts especially in the middle of the night. I enjoyed it, didn't have cracked nipples, and fed both DC on demand. I did not experience 'cluster' feeding and have never heard of it apart from on MN but presume it is just the growth spurt that happens c.14 weeks when the baby wants to feed more often - which I was happy to do as I read a book at the same time and was never bothered about housework etc. or cooking dinner for a set time. The only constraint I had was dropping and picking up from playschool, but I was happy to feed in public so not that much of a constraint! (Some many years ago in the 80s btw - most of the women I knew breastfed).

Breastfeeding is a skill

I agree very strongly with this. Just because it’s a natural process doesn’t mean that there isn’t ‘training’ required. I think in bygone generations, women in the family/community would have been on hand to provide help and advice and support. But society has changed and women (quite rightly) are no longer fastened into this female centric domestic existence, while the men are off doing the equivalent of the hunting. We have lost the handing down of this knowledge and skill. I don’t see it as a stretch to state that 97% of women are physically capable of breastfeeding. But who are they going to learn it from when the very midwives and health visitors, more often than not, lack that information and skill themselves? And then there’s the fact that their own mothers very often didn’t breastfeed. A double whammy of no guidance and often criticism for trying to do something that they themselves chose not to. My MIL was absolutely horrible to me and to her own daughter for choosing to breastfeed and I knew plenty of other women in the same boat.

I feel like long term combination feeding of a newborn/infant would be the worst of both worlds though? Most of the downsides of well-established breast feeding (being available all the time, not drinking etc) without the advantages (particularly not having to worry about having enough formula ready, bottles clean etc)

I used to just take the baby with me and didn't have to worry about when/what it would eat, whereas friends who were bottle feeding had to count bottles, bring extra formula etc. It seemed like a lot of work. And was a lot more expensive too.

Nope many couldn’t because the health of babies matter as does maternal mental health.

I did much of the above, many women do. Could not have continued, same as for many women. You don’t get to say what other women can and can’t do with their bodies.