I'm forwarding the below message from a Lactnetter who has personal
experience of breastfeeding a foster child and the (often) associated
ramifications.

Karleen Gribble
Australia

It's interesting to see how varied the reactions are to foster breastfeeding
even within the LACTNET community.  Our foster parenting classes told us to
treat foster children as if they were our own.  For me, that meant an infant
would be breastfed.  Dialogue at foster parent meetings highlighted the
frequency of doctor visits and hospitalizations for this vulnerable
population, leading to disruption for the foster family and eventual
burn-out.  We wanted to be as useful as possible for as long a possible.
With our foster child, I rolled the dice and lost with the kind of physician
I informed about our feeding choice.  Our premature, drug-exposed foster
child, weighing less than 5 pounds at discharge, was taken from us after
only 10 days.  As if to highlight the ethical conundrum clearly, I got
acquainted with a neighbor just months later who was breastfeeding her
foster child -- at the suggestion of his physician!  (Who was also a female
in her 30's in that community -- highlighting that when it comes to
breastfeeding, there's no predicting how a health care professional will
view their responsibility.)  I console myself that our foster baby's
transition to the wide world of pathogens was eased by the fact that his
mother had breastfed him before he was discharged and she went to rehab, and
I breastfed him for the first week and a half of his exposure to the outside
world (including our biological children in various years of school).


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