Michelle wrote: <I have a question about the nipple piercing idea. Would the barbells (i= s that the type of jewelry that would be used) remain in place when the bab= y is nursing or would they be removed prior to the actual breastfeeding. A= s a mother of a young women with many piercings (not her nipples, she knew better than that!!) I have seen that these rings and barbells can come loose and I would suppose possibly be sucked in by the baby. => Heather wrote: <There is a super article in the current Practising Midwife - not online AFAIK : ( - which details a midwife's quest to help solve the problem of mothers who want to bf, especially their prem babies, but who are reluctant to remove their nipple rings. Leaving the nipple rings in means these tiny babies can't feed....so she eventually discovered a solutiuon in a sex shop! These shops sell tiny plastic nipple *bars* with screw on balls at the ends, worn instead of metal rings, and they can be removed for sterisling (unlike the metal rings which are soft metal and cannot be autoclaved or put in solution.> Two points: Heather's example seems to be about mothers whose nipples themselves were already pierced, and the original piece of jewelry was removed and another put in place to keep the piercing open, I suppose. For myself, after I had gone to all the trouble to have a baby, and then the baby be born with the special risks of prematurity, I would certainly not want to take even the tiniest risk that one of those little balls would come unscrewed and end up in the baby's lung. The original article that I quoted was an obstetrician's solution for mothers with inverted nipples. He pierced the base of the nipple after lifting the nipple itself outward, not the nipple itself. He too used barbells to hold the tissue in place till tissue expansion could take place. Erik Scholten, ME PhD, writing in the July '99 Am J Obstet Gynecol, pp. 228-9, wrote: "Thus a continuously everted nipple can be achieved; it will remain everted until suckling of the newborn baby begins, at which time the body jewelry can be removed, although this is not strictly necessary." Again, if it were my baby, I wouldn't want to take any chances. K. Jean Cotterman RNC, IBCLC Dayton, Ohio USA ___________________________________________________________________ Why pay more to get Web access? Try Juno for FREE -- then it's just $9.95/month if you act NOW! Get your free software today: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj. *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html