mamamilkandme

One afternoon in my lactation clinic, I saw two mothers who came to see me because they couldn’t make milk. One was pregnant with her second child, and the other was considering a third pregnancy. Each described how they had looked forward to breastfeeding, taken classes, put their babies skin-to-skin and birth, offered the breast on demand, and then waited, for days, and then weeks, for milk that never came in. As the second mother came to the end of her story, she said, “No one ever told me this could happen. Have you ever heard of a woman not being able to make milk?”

“Yes,” I said. “There’s one in the very next room.”

The dogma is that inability to breastfeed is rare – “like unicorns,” one blogger wrote – but I was seeing an awful lot of unicorns in my clinic. I couldn’t help but wonder – how…