(Helen Gray wrote 'In her talk about mammals, Diane Wiessinger has also shared powerful evidence that in other species of mammals, smell and even taste (licking) is a crucial part of bonding between mother and infant. Indeed if a bitch gives birth under anaesthetic by caesarian, she will reject her own puppies when she smells them and licks them, unless they have been smeared with the placenta etc.')

This depends hugely on the species. Sarah Blaeffer Hrdy's fascinating book 'Mother Nature' has a great explanation of why this is so – it is an important evolutionary mechanism in mammals with mobile babies who live in groups, because otherwise a mother would be constantly nursing babies other than her own. 

The mammal most famous for this behaviour, and the one she uses as an example, is the sheep. Lambs in a flock can run round to any nursing ewe and try to nurse, and if a mother couldn't tell the difference between her own lambs and the other lambs in the flock she could easily end up with her milk being depleted by numerous unrelated infants taking it, which would hamper her ability to keep her own offspring alive. So, evolution has selected strongly for sheep who can smell the difference between their own lambs and others and who will refuse to nurse other lambs on this basis.

(This, of course, is why the traditional farming practice of skinning a dead lamb and tying its skin to the back of an orphaned lamb, so that the bereaved mother would accept and nurse the orphan, worked. Now that the mechanism is better understood, farmers can accomplish the same thing by the far less grisly method of rubbing the orphaned lamb against the bereaved ewe's vagina just after she gives birth so that it's covered in her amniotic fluid and secretions and acquires the vital smells that way. There's an official name for this, but I forget it.)

Now, the situation with primates is completely different; the babies are not mobile, the mother is not  likely to end up with random babies taking her milk, and so there isn't the same kind of evolutionary drive to avoid nursing a baby to whom you didn't give birth. This being so, it actually becomes an overall *advantage* in evolutionary terms to be able to accept and nurse a different baby, as it means a mother can sometimes keep alive the baby of a close relative who has died, and keep some genes going that way. So, while smell is still important to humans, it isn't crucial to bonding in the same way that it is for mammals with mobile newborns. (Also, babies don't have anything like the same kind of selectiveness in whom they nurse from, as the situation is reversed and it's an evolutionary *advantage* for a baby to be able to take milk from any mother willing to provide it in an emergency!)

As for the claims about the amniotic fluid 'landing light' path... sorry, but colour me dubious as hell. Under what circumstances would this be an advantage to a human baby? Apart from the breast crawl, human mothers lift babies directly to the breast when feeding them – they aren't expected to find their way there! I suspect that Weissinger and Gill are actually looking at work done on non-human species in which the infants *do* normally have to crawl along the mother's abdomen to find a nipple, and I bet that if we look into it we'll find there is precisely zero good evidence that washing or not washing your front makes one blind bit of difference to breastfeeding success in the early days in humans.

And my personal view... I still remember how brilliant the first bath after giving birth felt, when I was all sticky and sweaty and bloody, and how heavenly it was to lie back in the hot water and relax. If I'd had to sit up and carefully avoid washing my front because I'd been led to believe that doing so might hurt my breastfeeding chances and that I shouldn't do so unless I was feeling 'wretched'... well, that would have ruined the pleasure and been one more moment of anxiety and stress in the drive to perfectionism that, sadly, was my experience of new motherhood. I do *not* think it a good idea at all to throw in more and more potential restrictions on a breastfeeding mother's activities based on 'well, why not, after all it might help a bit...' when in fact there's no solid evidence. My experience has been that there's too much of that already and that the effects are not good. So, while these sorts of claims are interesting, I'd like to see a lot of scepticism and careful thought put into attempts to translate them into advice to new mothers. (And thank you to Maureen Minchin for her very sensible words and perspective on this!)

Best wishes,

Sarah Vaughan

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