Hi Lynn.

I agree that often new mothers are in no shape to understand the help or
instruction they are given -- this is more often a stumbling block than LC's
doing their job poorly, certainly!

But I also do think that this particular idea, that babies need to be shoved
onto the breast, is a common distortion of the otherwise good advice to
"bring the baby to the breast, not the breast to the baby."   And an LC whose
practice is entirely in a hospital (like the one in my anecdote) where many
babies are suctioned, and all need to have been documented nursing before
discharge might well come to believe that it is normal for babies to "need"
that kind of agressive handling to "teach" them to nurse.

In the case of my particular anecdote ("screw them in like a lightbulb") I am
pretty confident that it happened as I remember, not only in the light of my
later knowledge, but also because at that time we talked about it.  The LC
was rueful but straightforward about it; she told me that many babies would
"never" latch without it, but that having been shoved onto the breast and
having nursed successfully once they got the idea and would do fine.  She
didn't feel apologetic about this, in other words -- she felt she was
helping.  And in fact I had been unable to get the baby latched in the two
days before this, and wasn't able to myself again for nearly two more days
afterward.  So from her perspective you could say that that agressive feed
was what saved my daughter from supplementation or possible dehydration.  So
her idea that she was helping -- that that extra force, which we might call
an intervention in the spirit of another recent thread, was necessary.

These days, if I had the advising of my then-self, I'd probably suggest
hand-expressing a little colostrum, feeding it in a spoon now and then to
keep from having to worry about the baby's well-being, and meanwhile keep
gently maintaining skin to skin and patience until the baby was ready to
latch.

But, especially under the pressures of her hospital environment and given how
infrequently she probably ever saw the situation in which it left dyads
afterward, her approach wasn't crazy,  It was just, in my present opinion,
wrong headed on balance.

So I don't mean to blame, exactly.   I wrote more in sorrow than in anger.

Elisheva Urbas
lay bf philosopher in NYC

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