My spouse and I fell victim to the Nursing "Gestapo" in our region.

Nearly half of our 10 sessions of pre-natal classes dealt with nursing. There was a lot of "People will be against you and tell you not to do it or try to shame you" and "A lot of women have fought for our right to do it" and "It is wrong that breasts have become the objects of sexual desire they are now"...followed by a "but it's you choice, you know." Yeah right! All this meant we did not have time to learn any massage or pressure-points or other techniques our friends from towns learned.

Our baby was big: 22 inches and 9.5 lbs...and hungry. Mommy had a c-section so we needed to stay at the hospital 3 nights...of hell.

Mommy had little to no milk and baby was hungry and impatient. Nursing positions were limited because of the c-section and the main position they had us use, the "foot-ball", was complicated because of baby's length. The nurses on duty would spend 2 hours dicking around with trying to get baby to nurse, sometimes attaching a tube to mommy's nipple, with a baby screaming in a hungry panic, before finally giving up and giving her a bottle. When the next feeding time came, the nurse would not waste so much time and give her a bottle after 30 minutes of trying to nurse.

But then the shift would change. The new nurse would repeat the same pattern of dicking around for hours trying to get a screeching panicky hungry baby to nurse at milkless nipples. But with the bonus of having every new nurse dismiss all the previous nurse had said, including any progress she had told us we'd done.

We were both too much in a daze to realize what was happening. We wanted to be good parents and tried to learn all the nurses were telling us; not realizing it was often contradictory.

On the last day, my spouse was on the verge of tears. She hadn't slept for more than 48 hours (she had sent me home to get a night's sleep so at least one of us would be lucid).

The nurses didn't want us to leave. They thought she was hysterical and/or post-partum and thought she should stay. Towards the middle of the day they weren't even speaking directly to her anymore, just through me. They sent the nursing aide to see us 3 times (never mid we'd seen her the day before) to make sure we knew how to nurse and the baby knew how to suckle. We knew, the baby knew, there was just not enough milk for (what was) a 9.5 lbs baby.

The doctor came in and examined the baby, told us she had lost nearly 10% of her body weight and they might have to keep her. The word "malnutrition" pulled me out of my stupor.

I was furious. All this dicking around and the "professionals" I trusted and was trying to learn from were starving my child. It old them there was no way in hell we were staying one more night and to check us out now.

We left, past the nurses' station under their dirty looks, to a nice sunny day outside. We got home and gave her bottles of formula and pumped breast-milk for 3 months.

She's 8 months now and a healthy happy baby girl. She's still extremely impatiant when she gets hungry. I blame the nurses for traumatizing her ;)

The 'nursing Gestapo' as you put it, came into being for a reason. The formula companies had hospitals and doctors in the late 40s early 50s so convinced that b-feeding was dirty and sub-standard that my Grandmother gave birth to my mother at home. SHE had been so traumatized in the hospital when she tried to nurse the older child, and the staff demeaned her and tried to prevent that. Pushing formula, calling her 'backward' and 'uneducated' for wishing to b-feed.

Proof that when the pendulum swings the other way, people can be pretty rabid about the whole deal.

Jheurf, I feel your pain!

My first son was born a little underweight and couldn't feed properly at the breast. Being a physician, I was very self-conscious about throwing my weight around and acting like a jerk, so I only timidly asked if it wouldn't make sense to switch to a bottle, only to be rebuffed multiple times by the nurses who kept telling me that this was a "crucial" time to initiate breastfeeding.

Finally, my son began to get lethargic, at which point a blood test revealed he was severely hypoglycemic. He had to be rushed to the neonatal ICU and put on an IV sugar drip.

It has been my observation that breastfeeding proponents have many of the characteristics of cultists. If you and your baby are comfortable with breastfeeding then by all means do it, but don't make those who choose differently feel negligent or worse. I don't want to get into a whole debate about it because it would surely deteriorate into name-calling, but I'll only say that when it became clear that my son was going to have a lot of difficulty with breastfeeding, I reviewed the scientific literature in some detail (I am a physician and research scientist myself) and came away thinking that the evidence in favour of breastfeeding is not near as strong as many suppose.

Thank God some people get it. We have to make decisions based on what is best for our particular situation. Maybe breastfeeding is best in some pristine universe where all other factors are equal but we live in a messy complicated world and have to account for all manner of variables.

I too had a small baby born a little early and he wasn't strong enough and my milk wasn't coming out very easily. I pumped as long as I could handle the double duty and then switched him to formula. He has gone to work with me everyday since then and I'm grateful that I don't have to juggle nursing on top of working while caring for him (I'm also 7 months pregnant!).

So in my situation this combination worked best...and I hope that growing up in a bookstore (my business) will compensate for those 7 potential IQ points.

I live in Québec, so maybe our French-ness makes us more loose on the whole women's breast thing. I don't know the whole history of breast-feeding taboos (I am, after all, just a man), but from experience I'd never seen it as a problem before.

I've seen women nurse in public since I can remember and no one would dare tell them to stop. The harrasing jerk would be the one in trouble. If an airline asked a mother to stop nuring, there would be no question-period debate on the right to nurse, but a general condemnation of the airline.

Which why I was so confused by the hard-core nature of the pre-natal classe's discourse. To me, they were very passionately fighting windmills. It borderlined on intimidation, telling mothers they were practically betraying all the others who had fought for her right to do this.

Oh, and they looked at us like we came from Mars because my spouse was still working 3-4 months before her due date.

part of the problem with these overly intrusive and intimidating ( i don't care how well- meaning they might be...) people is the fact that expectant parents listen to them in the first place! YOu should have felt free to look at them like the idiots for suggesting some of the things that they were suggesting. It makes no sense that people feel so incensed about what is esentially a personal choice made for specific reasons. If people don't get that, they aren't too bright in the first place and do you really care what they think at all?

I'm sorry if you and your wife were not offered the option of trying a nursing supplementer. It sounds as if the nurses did not give you the option of a nursing supplementer, a device used at the breast to offer a little glucose water to help quiet the baby at the breast until the milk came in. Your hospital should have provided you with a competent IBCLC.

Milk production does not commence until all the estrogen and progesterone from the placenta are removed from the blood by the liver, and then (in first-time mothers) prolactin receptors must be made...all of this takes 3 to 4 days in the first time mom.

The baby is born with extra fluids to get him through with just the colostrum. A weight loss of 7-10% is normal and if the mother had a lot of IV fluids before the birth some babies will be born very bloated and pee off a lot more weight than 10% and still be fine. The skin and mucous membrane tell you if a baby is dehydrated or not, you cannot just go by the percentage weight loss because it can be misleading even in the other direction. Some babies who have not lost more than 10% of their birth weight (because they haven't stooled enough) are nonetheless dehydrated by the time someone calls me in. (I'm a board certifed lactation consultant, IBCLC)

The more drugs a mother gets during the birth the slower her milk will come in because her liver is busy excreting the drugs not just the placental hormones. I had a c-section with my sixth child and my baby was crying at my breast because the transitional milk was delayed.

When a baby is crying at the breast it is very tempting to give a bottle but using bottles to offer a supplement when lactogensis is delayed is jumping out of the frying pan into the fire...the baby will quickly develop a preference for artificial nipples and rejct his mother's nipple and the mother may never get to experience direct breastfeeding...just pumping which is a drag.

A supplement should be dripped on the nipples or given by a nursing supplementer (SNS) if a baby can latch but is unsatisfied with what is there in the days before the milk comes in. If by the fourth day milk has not appeared it will be necessary to give formula in the nursing supplementer rather than glucose water until the milk comes in, and a IBCLC should be called in to do an assessment.

Bottles should only be given to babies who cannot latch.

Write a letter to the hospital and complain that this simple device was not offered to you and as a result your baby developed a preference for artifical nipples and your wife had to pump and bottlefeed, and point out that if the baby had never gotten bottles almost surely would still be nursing now instead of being fed formula.

With your next baby insist that your hospital have a competent Board Certified Lactation consultant on hand to advise you about what to do in the event of delayed onset of lactogensis and to provide you with a nursing supplementer if it is needed.

Now men (and mothers who have never breastfed beyond on the problems) don't know this but missing out on breastfeeding is like missing out on love making. Many women have pain and discomfort with intercourse for months before it approaches anything pleasurable but they do not quit because they know it will get better and because they don't feel it is possible to sustain a marraige without intercourse.

Any man who feels it is no big deal to give a bottle should think about whether it would be no big deal if he never could make love to his wife because she preferred artificial insemination because when there where problems with love-making at the beginning she just gave up and said "oh hell" I can just use technology to get the job of procreation done.

Breastfeeding is more than a way to feed a baby, it is its own sort of lovemaking...the same hormone, oxytocin, that bonds a man and woman through intercourse, bonds a mother to her child...the milk ejection refelx is caused by oxytocin.

Of course pump dependent mothers love their babies but they have missed out on what was meant to be, and if a registered nursed caused the baby to have a preference for artificial nipples by recommending one to a mother's whose baby can breastfeed she would behaving unprofessionally.

If something happens that makes intercourse impossible between husabnd and wife they still can love each other but no one would argue that they aren't missing out on something special. The breastfeeding gestapo as you call them know what this something special is, and they don't want to give upon the breastfeeding relationship just because there can be difficulties at the beginning.


Just as intercourse can be difficult and even painful at first breastfeeding could be difficult the next time around but pound the door of every IBCLC in town looking for competent help next time before you throw in the towel. Breastfeeding like love-making is worth it.

Nursing a child though toddlerhood is a normal course of nursing just as making love early and in mid-marraige is normal, but then there comes a time eventually that love-making is no longer part of the marraige just as eventually the child weans from his mother's breast.

You didn't have much choice as to whether you needed one with a child that size, and the surgery plus the anesthesia etc. will dampen the ability to breastfeed. The nurses should know this. I think they meant well, of course, and I'm sure your child is no worse for the wear and tear, as much as I'm sorry you and your wife went through all that. Most important though is you should be extremely proud to manage 3 months of breastfeeding in any fashion despite those odds.

and explaining what was going on for everyone. It's too bad the people at the top poster's hospital weren't this clear on the purpose and need for what they were going through. It almost sounds like they weren't educated enough as professionals to realize the weight drop was within normal?