Judi writes:
"How do difficult deliveries, inductions, C-sections, etc. affect breastmilk
production?  I am not sure, but we have far too many women with little or no
colostrum easily expressed and babies getting a bit "dry."  I am convinced
there must be some correlation here. "

We are almost forced to ask how would normal birth effect breastfeeding--b/c so few of us are seeing normal birth at all. It's a lot like looking at the breastfeeding literature and wondering just how few babies in any given study were exclusively bf. IMO, we could all pretty much go home and find other careers if we as a culture stopped mucking with birth the way we do. So long as we rarely see normal birth, we will sadly be unable to recognize the consequences of medicalized birth--we just have no frame of reference. I am so grateful to have had homebirths and to have the majority of my close friends have homebirths, b/c it means I do have this frame of reference. The problem then becomes the utter frustration in knowing that what we are dealing with is completely unecessary (not to mention brutal and destructive).

I think we as LC's need to take some greater responsibility in speaking out against medicalized birth, in educating parents about its consequences and in educating ourselves as well. The fact is that the vast majority of every single intervention imposed on any mother and baby are not needed, are harmful and result in breastfeeding and/or attachment difficulties.

I also think that women who have just been imprinted at the most vulnerable time in their lives to believe that tools are needed to birth their babies are not likely to believe that babies are indeed low-tech people who need little intervention to behave as nature intended. They have just been taught that it isn't safe to wait for things to take their natural course, that nature is flawed, that their bodies don't work properly, that interventions are necessary and "harmless", that their own instincts are probably wrong (if accessable to them at all), that people who look like doctors know more than they do--the indoctrination is brief but powerful--a perfect example of the "teachable moment". And, to top it all off, the drugs and wounds and stitches and separation and other physical trauma confirms this--their bodies often really are not working anymore.
Jennifer Tow, IBCLC, CT, USA

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