Elizabeth,
I'm sure that there are many reasons for babies to have a poor suck, and certainly the suctioning would make sense. I have been a hospital IBCLC for the past 3 years. We see every new mother (breastfeeding) . There are 2 of us and between us, we work 7 days a week for about 4-5 hours/day. Our hospital has about 1100 deliveries/year. We have a high C/S rate (20%), but only use epidurals on about 3% of our SVD's. We are finding that the problems seem to come in groups ( perhaps related to staff involved?). As far a a study goes, we are working on it , but it is time consuming. How do you narrow down the variables that will be considered etc?
We use epimorph in the epidural and then mom is managed on Tylenol # 3's.
The suck that we see with these babies is typical- we call it a crunch and munch, baby will latch on, take 1 or 2 chomps then stop. Interestingly, these babies suck usually really well on a finger. Has anyone else observed this behavior?
We do have the priviledge of keeping mom and baby in hospital until the breastfeeding is going well, and this may take as long as 5 - 10 days! Most moms want home before that, so we send them home pumping for all poor feeds and finger feeding EBM. This is less than ideal. Do others do this?

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