I also have noticed anxious women finding it easier to do the pumping.  It seems to be such a 
relief to them that they can control the process.  It takes a great deal of work to get them to relax 
enough to trust their own bodies.  

Amazingly, one of my most anxious moms gave up nursing for a while due to severe nipple pain.  
I made sure she was not quitting just because of her anxiety, talking her through gradually 
tamping down her supply.  Mentioned that if, as she was gradually weaning off the nursing & 
pumping, she found a point where she was comfortable with what she was doing, she could keep 
doing it.   She was one of those women who, once you give them permission to quit, rethink the 
whole situation.   So, she did nurse a few times a day when she got comfortable latches.  She hit 
her stride with that and went to see my colleague's support group at just the right moment.   I 
swear my colleague could talk a stone into building up a milk supply.  So after my colleagues pep 
talk about how she might have to wean earlier if she only nursed once or twice a day, she pumped 
like a maniac for a week or two using her anxious energy to achieve "perfection".  She got the 
supply entirely up to speed and now nurses at the breast and has made it to the six month mark 
so far!   A case or two like that can get you through weeks of the "delegated mothering" moms.  

I am dead certain that the pump plays the role of the modern day wet nurse amongst a good 
portion of my clientele.  Most are professional women that are used to being in control of their 
lives.  Then there is an even more rarified select group of women in Manhattan who, for 
generations, probably never played much of a role in their children's life until they were old 
enough to sit down at a formal dinner - say around age sixteen or so.  I think of Princess Diana 
when I see these women and how Diana struggled to break free of that role of leaving your kids 
with the nanny and sending them off to boarding school.  I actually heard a parent at some talk 
about how to get your kid into kindergarten, refer to his child as a "product".  I'm not 
exaggerating.  

In some ways, it is a shame that the wet nurse role has disappeared.  The infants of the "delegated 
mothering" crowd would at least have had that warm contact with someone's body, if not that of 
their own mother.  But when I think about the nanny cams and everything else that is done to 
screen nannies these days, I can't imagine what a wetnurse would be put through before she was 
deemed acceptable as a wetnurse.  She'd probably be locked in a closet and never be allowed to 
have sex again after whatever initially encounter she had that enabled her to produce the milk in 
the first place.  Then I can sort of imagine the hormonal treatments that wetnurses might undergo 
to make them produce milk without having gone through pregnancy and birthing, sort of like the 
treatments that surrogate egg donors undergo.  But, I think the more likely scenario seems as if 
we might have goats that produce human instead, but without the possibility of human babies 
clinging to them like those desparate little monkeys in the pscyhological experiments that clung 
to their surrogate dog mothers.  

Where did medical science goof in neglecting to figure out how to help women who have problems 
breastfeeding overcome those problems rather than coming up with all these substitutes?  It 
annoys me that men can have viagra, but when we work with women with low supply, sometimes 
we can be totally stumped and not be able to bring it back again no matter what we do.

Sigh, so back to the reality of looking at how to bring out the good in a situation, the one positive 
thing about the use of the pump as a wetnurse is that many more infants are getting milk from 
mothers who really would never otherwise have considered breastfeeding.  These are the women 
who probably would have started with formula or at least drifted to using increasing amounts of 
formula because that "contact with the baby" interferes with their lifestyle.  Seen in this light - it 
can be seen as a plus, at least these infants are getting breast milk while we work on the longer 
harder task of encouraging societies that value contact with children rather than seeing it as a 
burden.  So, when we feel as if we will never get a chance to see a totally natural development of 
the breastfeeding relationship - we have to keep in mind the gradual incremental improvements 
over the period when almost all women bottle fed formula in many developed countries.


Best regards, Susan Burger

PS.  Can you tell that I really need the Norway lactation consultant exchange program right about 
now?

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