Getting Started with Breastfeeding |
Excerpt from: Pregnancy and Birth (April 2007, Key Porter Books)
SOME IMPORTANT REASONS TO BREASTFEED
Babies who are not breastfed have a increased risk of:
- respiratory infections and ear infections
- gastrointestinal infections, diarrhea, or constipation
- allergies, including food allergies, eczema, and asthma
- iron-deficiency anemia
- problems with jaw and dental development that may require braces or other orthodontic work
- illnesses serious enough to require admission to hospital
- sids (sudden infant death syndrome)
- diabetes
- obesity
- some childhood cancers
- lower scores on intelligence and achievement tests
Help mothers initiate breastfeeding within one half-hour of birth.
Your hospital may not do this routinely, but you can discuss this with your caregiver and ask to have it written into your birth plan. To help initiate breastfeeding successfully, you may also want to take the step of minimizing medication during labour and birth. All medication including epidurals, do affect the baby’s ability to suck effectively. With good help, many mothers and babies are able to overcome this difficult start to breastfeeding. But where other problems are also present, the baby’s uncoordinated sucking in the first days may lead to the mother weaning early. The medication itself is not the only factor. When a labouring woman has an epidural anaesthetic, for example, she will also be given intravenous fluids, and after the baby is born, this extra fluid can cause edema (swelling) and breast engorgement. This engorgement—caused not by too much milk in the breasts, but by too much fluid—often makes latching the baby on very difficult, even if the baby had managed to breastfeed before the engorgement set in. Women are often then advised to pump to relieve the pain, only to find that pumping simply pulls more fluid into the breasts and makes the situation worse.
Keeping mothers and babies together after birth and encouraging immediate breastfeeding is very helpful. When babies nurse in the first two hours after birth, they are less likely to be weaned early than babies who didn’t nurse until four or more hours after they are born. This doesn’t mean that the baby who needs special care (or is not able to nurse for some other reason) is doomed to breastfeeding failure, but it does point out that these babies and mothers may need some extra help in getting nursing established. What if your baby doesn’t latch on and start to nurse even after an hour or two? The skin-to-skin contact you are both enjoying is still very valuable—it helps to stabilize your baby’s temperature and blood sugar.
What if your baby was born by Caesarean? The Baby-Friendly guidelines suggest that your baby should still be given the opportunity to breastfeed in that first half hour. With a knowledgeable person to help you, your baby can latch on even while the surgical incision is still being closed.
SELF-ATTACHMENT
Increasingly, research is showing that babies know more about how to breastfeed than people used to believe. Sometimes if the baby is held to the breast after birth it will nuzzle or lick at the nipple and not be interested in nursing. But many babies will actively seek out the breast and begin to suckle.
One researcher filmed a number of newborns who were simply placed, tummy down, on their mother’s abdomens after they were born. The babies soon began to crawl on their stomachs towards the nearest breast. They found the nipple, then attached themselves and began sucking well without any assistance.
Excerpt reprinted with permission from Key Porter Books.
