I agree with Patricia Loewy that we should not automatically expect that mothers after age 40 will have difficulty with breastfeeding, but many factors besides chronological age come into play here.
People posting previously on Lactnet have noted that some mothers with a number of previous breastfed children seem to now make less milk with a current baby.  We don’t know if that is a factor of how busy and tired they may be, or if something else is going on.

For first time, older moms, we have to consider if they had a history of infertility or other factors that made it difficult to acheive pregnancy earlier and that might also impact milk production.  Like all mothers, they deserve a thorough history and assessment and our best efforts to get breastfeeding off to a good start.

I helped one new mother, age 48, with breastfeeding her twins.  She did struggle initially with supply issues but was able to partially breastfeed them and expressed good quantities of milk for them for much of their first year.  There were a number of other complicating factors (C-section, born 6 weeks early, got used to being bottle-fed in in NICU, developed preference for bottles, nursing strike, illness, pump malfunctions, return to work with long commutes, and more) that impacted her milk supply.  But she felt like a breastfeeding mom and was proud of her efforts to supply milk for her babies.

In her book, “The Politics of Breastfeeding,” (Chapter 12, page 186 of the 2009 edition) Gabrielle Palmer cites a wet nurse named Judith Waterford, written up in medical literature in 1831:

“She celebrated her 81st birthday by demonstrating that she could still squeeze from her left breast, milk which was ‘nice, sweet and not different from that of young and healthy mothers.’  Judith was married at the age of 22, and for the next 50 years supplied milk to babies.  She fed six children of her own, eight nurslings, and many children of her friends and neighbors.  In her prime she produced two quarts of breastmilk unfailingly every day, but admitted sorrowfully that after the age of 75 she would not have managed to breastfeed effectively more than one infant at a time.”
Quoted from I. Digby and B. Mathias, The Joy of the Baby, 1969. ( More detailed reference to this source not given.)

Anne Altshuler, RN, MS, IBCLC, LLLL
Madison, WI USA
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