>There is a TON of information about beliefs about breastfeeding during pregnancy in different cultures around the world. Generally speaking, the majority of people do not think it is a good idea to continue breastfeeding while you are pregnant, and have cultural rules about weaning the baby when you find out you are pregnant. There are several caveats to interpreting this information however: 1. In many, many cultures, there was traditionally a post-partum sex taboo that prohibited sexual intercourse between the parents while the baby was still nursing, even if that meant 3 or 4 years of no sex. This was a child spacing mechanism, either consciously or unconsciously people recognized that children born too close together were both a drain on the mother and at higher risk of dying for the older child. That meant that a woman who was still nursing and who was pregnant again had BROKEN THE TABOO, and the stated rationale for weaning the older child was that the semen had contaminated the milk and would make the child sick. 2. Where post-partum sex taboos were, for example, only until the baby walked and talked, but not necessarily until it was weaned, women could resume sexual relations while the baby was still nursing. However, the child was still probably 12-18 months old, and was not as affected by weaning due to another pregnancy. 3. In addition, most women in "traditional" (non-Western, non-Industrial) cultures nurse their children on demand, many times a day and many time at night, where they are sleeping together, and do not use pacifiers or bottles, and thus have relatively long post-partum amenorrhea from lactation. So, again, the child is usually into its second or even third year of life before the mother's fertility returns and she gets pregnant again. So if her culture tells her to wean the child, it isn't a big deal. 4. Finally, in Mali, where I do research, people say that you can get around the rule of not nursing while pregnant in several ways. One is to take special traditional medicine that the herbalists can provide which "prevents the semen from entering the breast milk." The other is more subtle -- women don't necessarily know whether they are pregnant or not. A missed menstrual period doesn't necessarily mark pregnancy, as many women have sporadic menstrual periods while resuming fertility, and others miss periods due to poor nutrition, and still others have early miscarriages that are not recognized as such, merely as "a missed period doesn't mean you are pregnant." Therefore, they wait for some secondary confirmation of pregnancy such as morning sickness or sore breasts, or 3-4 months of missed periods. So by the time they have finally decided they are pregnant and have decided to wean the child, they may be 4-5 months pregnant, and the child is 2-4 years old. Thus, nursing during pregnancy cross-culturally is relatively rare, and is found probably most often in the U.S., where women are very well-nourished and healthy, and even though breastfeeding, encourage their infants to nurse on a schedule, use a pacifier, and sleep through the night early, so their periods/fertility returns quickly. My own experience of 23 months of lactational amenorrhea is thought to be "atypical" even by my breastfeeding friends. I have another friend who had 36 months of lactational amenorrhea with her first child. I always use these examples in classes of undergraduates to stress one of the many extra advantages of breastfeeding on-demand for several years, and co-sleeping. Hope this info helps! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------- Katherine A. Dettwyler email: [log in to unmask] Anthropology Department phone: (409) 845-5256 Texas A&M University fax: (409) 845-4070 College Station, TX 77843-4352