Not quite, its very difficult and rarely fully successful to induce lactation if you haven’t given birth. Possible - it does happen. And most women can induce SOME milk - although usually insufficient without supplemental feedings.
If it were that easy, they wouldn’t bother to give women a shot to get their milk to dry up when they intended to bottlefeed (which I don’t think they bother to do anymore) - cause your milk wouldn’t come in.
I don’t think this is true at all. Women produce milk in the weeks prior to birth. Otherwise, there would be no milk available for an immediate post-birth feeding. When a woman gives birth, her progesterone levels collapse. This stimulates milk production almost immediately.
And god forbid someone does give your baby a bottle shortly after birth, pump.
No one has any business giving your child a bottle without asking you first, but if it does happen, it is not exactly a long-term tragedy.
Usually not. Milk comes in GENERALLY 24-48 POST birth. Colostrum is available to the baby until them.
Mine came in after a week (which seems to be normal in my family) - I had to supplement. And if my frantic pumping to make sure I had supply was any indication, there wasn’t colostrum either available to her.
What does it being difficult have anything to do with a shot? If anything, that makes it sound like a good reason NOT to give a shot.
I never said it was a long-term tragedy - just saying that when Dio says “it never happens” nowadays, he’s full of shit. And frankly, I was more stressed about the cavalier unawareness that maybe I would want to be the one to feed my very own baby than about the whole introduction of formula thing.
So someone gave your kid a bottle. So what? You should have said thank you.
No, man, gotta say you’re wrong about this. I’m the least crunchy granola person on the planet, and I would have been pissed if someone did this. The hospital has no business going against your express wishes on feeding. If they’re concerned for some reason, then they can talk to you about it, but just doing it for no reason? That’s not acceptable.
Thanks for what? For expressly disregarding her wishes about the care of her child?
Breastfeeding can be bitch-ass-hard to establish even if everything goes well, and missing feedings because some clueless nurse is formula-feeding your kid against your direct request doesn’t help. This isn’t a mystery. The process of breastfeeding is a fairly well-understood process of human physiology. Giving birth stimulates hormones that start the lactation process, and nipple stimulation from the baby’s nursing helps the milk to come in, and helps to establish a sufficient milk supply. Missing feedings early on and having your kid’s belly filled with formula so he’s not hungry for actual milk can cause significant problems.
And this isn’t some kind of “my child must never have formula” thing from me. Assuming that a new mother wants to breastfeed, there is no reason in the world for nursing staff to give formula feedings unless there’s a medical necessity for them or the mother requests it.
To those who want their birth to be “special”: you have the rest of your child’s life ahead of you, full of special moments. What you want for the birth is efficient.
Amen.
I gave birth to my son in Iowa. I didn’t breastfeed. I did, however, request that he not be circ’d. They had DO NOT CIRCUMCISE signs all over his baby stuff, you know, just in case. I found it amusing.
Actually, Phlosphr is one of the most reasonable home birth advocates I have heard.
He has researched all of the options, including hospital, birthing center, and home birth.
They are seeing an Ob/Gyn as well as their CNM.
They have chosen an experienced CNM and not a lay midwife.
They have arranged for ambulance back-up.
While I’ve said before that I wouldn’t have a home birth (particularly for a first pregnancy), they have clearly weighed the risks and benefits and are willing to accept what are statistically quite small risks.
What does bother me is the story NAF tells about his “successful” transport story. That story scares the crap out of me. You have a baby with the cord around her neck and a true knot and meconium in the fluid and because of the home birth/need to transport the mother ended up delivering breech rather that having a c-section. There are so many things that could have gone wrong. The baby could have stayed head-down and been strangled by the cord or have had the oxygen cut off by the knot in the cord. She could have inhaled or swallowed meconium (for those that don’t know, meconium is the first baby stool which is very thick and sticky-as you will know if you’ve ever changed a newborn’s diaper-and can cause terrible breathing problems if inhaled or block the intestines if swallowed. The chief of OB apparently tried to examine the mother to see if they could still do a c-section and not only did she punch him but NAF considers this a good thing. This is one time that a c-section was justified and anybody pretending that the successful “natural” birth was anything other than a lucky miracle is crazy. When you contrast this to Phlosphr and his research and knowledge of the risks and acceptance of the possibility of interventions it makes Phlosphr seem quite reasonable.
As an aside, what’s with all the crap about birthing tubs and water births? Since when is it natural for babies to be born underwater?
Also, NAF used castor oil at home while the midwife (and lay person who was inexperienced) were nowhere near. It sped up the birth and caused complications.
Philosphr’s position scares me because he is ok with the fact that he lives so far from a hospital. EMTs can’t help in a bona fide emergency.
Well, ENugent said it was more about that she wanted to feed her own baby. I think that’s what Dio was responding to…
I was pissed about both parts. The potential effect on breastfeeding (which turned out OK, although it did take five days for my milk to come in), and the attitude about whose baby it was, anyway. I mean, honestly, if she’d said, “Your baby woke up and was crying, so I offered her some milk - I’ll bring her to you when I’ve finished this,” that would be one thing. The bright, “I just fed your baby!” with no acknowledgment that I might want to have anything to do with such activities, whether for breastfeeding reasons or just because she was my brand new baby, pissed me off.
But whether it was a bad thing or not in this case is irrelevant. Dio is just trying to deflect any notice of my main point, which is that when he says such things never happen any more, he is R-O-N-G wrong.
I was oversimplifying, but the point remains that there is a physiological reason not to miss feedings, something Diogenes totally ignored in his subsequent posts.
Heh, my wife and I did Bradley, and we ended up with every kind of drugs when her blood pressure spiked to 190/horrible. Six months later, healthy mom and healthy baby, what more could you ask for?
My impression from these boards is that How to kill a suffering deer humanely, without a gun? [graphic images warning] - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board this is how Phlosphr handles a stressful situation that goes against his crunchy views. Fair in real life or not, this is how he comes across in these 2 home birth threads. The worst that can happen is not the fucking birth center.
For those of you not into reading he found a mortally injured deer on his property. Rather than weakly ignore the situation or bravely using his gun to end its suffering, he had moral buddhistlike qualms but made sure to include pictures and a detailed account of its suffering as he whined about not being able to decide to do the right thing.
Yeah, I don’t mean to trash on Bradley, by the way. I think that it does a great job of teaching you what actually happens during the process of labor and delivery, and the relaxation techniques are still helpful to me during, for example, dental procedures and whatnot. I didn’t have what you might call an optimal Bradley outcome, but I don’t regret having taken the classes.
Some of the instructors can be a little bit whackadoodle, but you just have to find one that isn’t.
I would be “meh” if I was a baby who died because of any kind of making-things-harder-than-necessary birthing plans. My parents would no doubt suffer tremenduous guilt, but perhaps my death would learn their asses and they would be a little wiser the next go-round.
But I would be very PISSED if I found out that I could trace my severe disabilities to my parent’s unconventional philosophies. I guess caring for a disabled child for the rest of their life would also learn their asses. But It would still suck for me, though.
When hospitals fuck up, you’ve got someone besides yourself to blame, and the self-righteousness (and settlement) to soften the blow. When it’s you who’s making things unnecessarily risky and things go awry, well, you’ll not only have to carry that guilt but also the heavy responsibilities that follow. Plus everyone looking at you sideways. It may just make you lose faith in the very spirituality that motivated your decisions in the first place.
I was a difficult birth, having been breech and delivered c-section (oh yeah, and I had someone else tagging along with me!) Would we have made it if my parents have taken the path of hardest resistance and had us at home? I don’t know, but even if we had, I don’t think I would have appreciated them taking that risk on our behalf like that. There’s risk you can easily avoid and risk you simply have to endure. I think responsible parenting starts off with a minimalist philosophy when it comes to risk, gradually increasing once the child becomes less dependent. Starting off with high risk just doesn’t make sense to me. But I tend to be overly rational.
Have the kid at home if that floats your boat, but PLEASE make sure your back-ups have back-ups and that they have back-ups! All the spiritual woo in the world ain’t gonna make things better if things fall apart.