Dear Pamela,
Although your response was to Chanita's post about percentage of women
unable to produce milk I immediately connected it to my post last week in
response to a query about mothers  who appeared to be not producing breat
milk...my post was regarding two mothers I have worked with and one who
told me after a presentation that the case study of the other two fit her
experience:  please let me reiterate to you as I want to see if this fits
your post: both these mothers took medication to stimulate ovulation so
that they could become pregnant and both did not seem able to produce in
spite of their and their babies best efforts and them trying every
suggestion that I could beat from every bush I could find for suggestions.
Does this fit your experience?  My next thought:  is fair to count this
group of women in the % of women truely not able to produce milk because in
the nature of things without modern medical help they probably would not
have become pregnant thus milk production would not have been an issue.
Should this data be limited to women who conceive without medical
intervention?
Linda Beckler, RN, BSN, IBCLC
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> From: Pamela Morrison IBCLC <[log in to unmask]>
> To:
> Subject: Stats on inability to breastfeed
> Date: Saturday, October 25, 1997 4:45 PM
>
> Catching up, and just came across Chanita's message, where she says, "But
> the fact is that only one in 10 mothers, if that many, absolutely can't
feed
> their babies, either due to maternal or infant causes."
>
> Is the figure for mothers who can't breastfeed really that high?
> Infant-related breastfeeding difficulties are many and varied, but the
large
> majority can be resolved with time, if the mom is motivated to maintain
> lactation, and would not ultimately seem to be valid reasons for "not
being
> able to breastfeed."  Maternal causes may be more critical.  Today I saw
a
> mother of a 4-day-old baby referred by her OB because she has "no milk".
I
> was very sceptical of this diagnosis, but it's true.  Breasts large and
> flaccid, massage and manual expression produced not even a glisten.
Mother
> has one other child aged 5 years, no lactation for this baby either, and
no
> menstruation for two and a half years prior to this pregnancy, ovulation
> induced with medication. This brings to 3 the number of new mothers (out
of
> about 1800) I have seen who literally did not lactate.  This brings my
> personal "can't BF" stats to 0.16%, before today it was 0.11%.  Perhaps
> others have different figures?
>
> Pamela, Zimbabwe
> mailto:[log in to unmask]
>