Thanks all for sharing your knowledge and experience about this. I´ll make sure no more healthy
moms throw away good breastmilk!!!

It makes sense to test the mom for a few basic infectuous diseases, I guess that makes for good
practice.
About the wetnursing, I have seen it done here at my hospital. I walked into a room (our rooms
are shared by two moms) to see a woman who had asked for me because her milk had not come in yet
and she was worried her day and a half baby was very hungry. She had refused supplementing with a
bottle when the nurses offered. I walked in and saw that she had no baby - and that the other
woman was nursing two! I was very surprised and it must have shown on my face. I had never seen
that before. The mother of the hungry baby asked me to forgive her (as if she had done something
terrible, I felt bad for her) but her baby was really hungry. I explained that there was no
problem because of the fact that another woman would bf her baby, that she need not apologize to
me and that the problem was that we needed to work on her own supply and for that she needed to
nurse her own baby, etc etc and went to work with her.

The thing is these two women were not from Spain, they were from Ecuador (we have many inmigrants
from Ecuador). I dont think that culturally spanish women would be ready for that. Although, as
Joylyn said, probably more people do this than we realize, or at least think about it. I know
sometimes, when seeing a problematic latch, I´ve felt the urge to latch the baby unto my own
breast to see if I could feel what the problem was, exactly :-)  And I´ve had at least one
problem mom ask me if she could latch my Laura unto her breast to see what a normal, correct
latch is supposed to feel like.

Fortunately we have enough technichal resources that this is not needed - but I cannot deny I
have given it thought.

Anyway, the wetnursing experience sounds beautiful, truly.

Kika Baeza
Family Physitian
Madrid, Spain

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