Unfortunately I saw the recent Time Life cover with the 5 year old sucking moms titty. Plus she’s nursing an adopted child from Africa.
Could these kid still nurse off her as teenagers? 
Is there a limit on how long mothers can produce milk? Will the breast keep producing milk as long as a kid is nursing off it?
Makes me wonder if that Dugger woman has been nursing those 20 kids of hers non-stop.
I’m pretty sure there’s no correlation and one doesn’t even need to have been pregnant to produce milk in the first place. Can’t surrogate or adoptive mums produce milk given the stimulation?
I’m willing to participate in a study.
*All women are different, in any medical question there is a big variation.
That said I think it is like a switch that comes with your first pregnancy, it has been two years since my wife was pregnant and she never really breast fed but not due to lack of trying.
Yet if we have sex too frequently my wife starts lactating again(due to sucking). If we back off on that it quickly stops.
That’s a three year-old she’s breastfeedingon the cover, and in a pose the photographer put them in rather than the usual half-sitting position breastfeeding toddlers take. She does not feed her child standing up, like a calf and a cow.
Typically, a (male or female) breast will produce milk as long as it’s properly stimulated to do so; there are countries where children are breastfed until 5 or older b/c of a lack of nutritious food. There have been women throughout history who were paid wet-nurses for years and years; that was their job.
Did you mean to put this in General Questions, where factual questions w/o a subjective basis go? Or IMHO?
This is a factual question.
How long can a human breast produce milk? There should be a physical limit.
You wouldn’t expect that it would be possible for a 8 or 10 year old child to breastfeed from mom. But is it possible?
:dubious:Men can lactate usually under unusual conditions, but from stimulation alone? I find it difficult to believe if I hooked up a electric breast pump to a normal adult male he would just start lactating.
To the bolded, why would you think that? Mammary glands produce as long as they’re asked and able to do so. If you go to the link I included in my first reply you can see by what mechanism. Be warned, there are pictures of breasts with babies and toddlers feeding from them at that link.
You’re right as that’s not proper stimulation. Lactation can be stimulated by any number of means, be they herbal, hormonal or by physical manipulation.
Can you provide some evidence for this claim that males are able to lactate through physical manipulation?
I would speculate that combining herbal or hormonal protocols w/ the physical manipulation of a breast pump would be more successful for men to lactate but some have written otherwise.This page has many of the same sources I’ve read since I started looking into inducing lactation myself (though I’m a woman). Be warned there are GRAPHIC thumbnail pictures of naked women and women giving birth at the link.
As for the question about a time limit on female lactation, AFAICT the other respondents are correct that there’s no physical limit on the natural duration of lactation, as long as periodic suckling stimulation keeps the prolactin flowing. Apparently induced lactation can occur even in postmenopausal women.
And when you consider how vitally important breastfeeding has been for the survival of offspring throughout most of human history, you can kind of see why having more emergency options for producing breast milk might be evolutionarily advantageous.
Those are all unusual conditions, ditto for hormone supplements.
I’m having no luck finding her name at the moment, but the oldest woman reputed to be working as a wet nurse was 85. It’s very possible, of course, that she wasn’t quite that old, as record keeping in the days of yore wasn’t all that great, but she was certainly elderly.
Now…that’s not “normal”. Most women don’t lactate nearly that long. But that could be because most women don’t want to or try to, so we don’t really know what the “normal” limit is. Most women can lactate as long as they keep extracting milk, whether it be by mouth, hand or, if they’re lucky, pump. (Some women can’t extract milk with a pump at all - babies don’t remove milk by sucking exactly, but by compression. Pumps suck, and only work for some.)
There have been substantiated reports of male lactation, but again, it’s not “normal”. It’s probable that they have some sort of hormonal issue going on that hasn’t been diagnosed…especially probable as most of these reports come from third world countries, where the medical care is a bit different than ours.
But many (I don’t know if it’s “most”) non-biological mothers, non recent mothers and fathers *can *lactate if you give them enough hormones first. The most common therapy involves giving high doses of estrogen/progesterone (birth control pills) and domperidone - a medication that indirectly increases prolactin levels - for a few months (if possible) and then abruptly stopping the estrogen/progesterone. This mimics the hormone pattern of pregnancy and then childbirth. Nipple stimulation is generally advised, as well. Sometimes herbs such as blessed thistle and fenugreek are suggested too. Google **Newman-Goldfarb Protocols **if you want to know more.
There are special feeders which adoptive parents can use to help things along. Basically a bottle or bag of milk or formula is hung around the parent’s neck with a tube that goes around to the nipple. The tube and nipple are placed in the infant’s mouth. As the child feeds, he gets milk from the tube and the stimulation increases the prolactin level in the parent. Ideally, the parent begins to produce his/her own milk and the bottled milk and tube are discontinued. Google Lact-aid supplementer for more information.
I don’t think anybody here has claimed that human males lactate except under unusual conditions.
Have you ever actually seen a father(or even read of one in medical journals) actually successfully doing this and breast feeding a child?
:eek: Amazing. I would have thought the hormone changes in menopause would have stopped milk production.
Ok, this brings up the obvious question. Did primitive societies use women instead of livestock for milk production? If a primitive tribe had no cows or goats, but hey had fifty women and a bucket.
That wouldn’t fly today. That’s for sure. 
But, it might be a solution for a very primitive tribe.
Even men with prolactin secreting tumors of the pituitary gland (where elevated prolactin levels are sustained for years and at levels far in excess of those produced by manual stimulation) rarely, if ever, lactate.
That observation reminds us that only a breast primed by sufficient estrogen will respond to prolactin stimulation to produce milk. So unless a man also has abnormally high estrogen levels as well as high prolactin levels (no matter how induced), he will almost never lactate.
A single goat can outproduce a woman any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Even superlactators can’t match a cow or a yak. 
And before modern breast pumps, there was really no good way to milk a woman unless the milker swallowed the milk. Most of us can’t get more than a few dribbles or quick squirt by hand, and as I said before, many of us can’t even get out much milk with a good pump. Udders are better than breasts for milking without immediate consumption.
Seen? No. But I’ll be honest, I’ve only seen maybe a dozen *women *lactate with my own eyes. Anecdotal reports and case reports yes, most of which were mentioned in the thread or in articles linked to in the thread already. I’ve heard tell of some gay fathers giving it a go, too. But as far as I can tell, there have not been scientific studies of the issue.
As WhyNot noted, in pre-modern times it was hard to milk a human female except by direct suckling.
Probably more importantly, though, it’s unlikely that any early humans drank breast milk after young childhood, except in very unusual circumstances. AFAIK, no other mammalian species habitually consumes mother’s milk in adulthood (because they, like early humans, habitually become lactose-intolerant at that stage), and I don’t know any reason to think that humans would have done so.
Probably most importantly of all, though, it’s not efficient to feed a female perfectly good people-food just in order to get milk from her. If you’ve got enough high-quality omnivore-diet sustenance to keep a “milch woman” lactating, you might as well just eat it yourself and skip the dairy-production step. The only people who can’t eat regular people-food instead of breast milk are infants, so it makes sense to restrict breast milk production to infant use only.
The advantage to using ruminants instead of humans when it comes to dairy farming (besides the greater yield and greater ease of milking that WhyNot mentioned) is that they’ll produce all that milk on a diet of pasture grass that is nutritionally useless (or at least very low-value) to you. They turn low-calorie forage that you mostly can’t eat anyway into high-protein, high-calorie milk that you can.