I just saw the preview for the Simpsons episode where Abu’s wife gives birth to their nine kids, and it reminded me of the scene later on in the series where Abu is wearing an apron with 8 bottles on it so he can feed a lot of them at once. And it got me thinking:
In order to breast feed that many babies, her breast would have to be HUGE!!!.
Now, we all know that a woman’s breast enlarge during pregnancy in order to make breast feeding possibly, but I’m curious: do the breast enlarge in a ration that corresponds to the number of children she is going to bare?
For example: If a woman’s first pregnancy yields one child, and her second yields triplets, would her breast be bigger during the second pregnancy due to the increased number of kids, or would they be roughly the same?
Or am I just really lonely and in need of a girl to just whap me in the face with her bossom?
Breasts do typically enlarge during pregnancy and nursing, but overall size has nothing to do with milk production–women with small breasts don’t make less milk than women with larger breasts. It’s a supply and demand thing. The woman with triplets would make more milk, but only in response to the increased amount of nursing she was doing.
To expound a little on what cher was saying, the amount of milk produced increases with demand, as measured by the amound expelled from the breasts. That’s why a women can breast feed a one-day old baby and later an 8 month old baby. As the baby grows, and drinks more milk, the breasts produce more milk.
I would imagine that with triplets, the breasts would immediately have a larger demand than with a single child, and would quickly ramp up production to match demand.
I don’t know about correlation between size and production, but Cher claims there is none.