By Jennifer Brozowski, Mom and Behavior Health Specialist

My son, Jakob, was born 3 days after his due date weighing 8lbs 6 oz, healthy and very hungry. I delivered by c-section and my milk did not come in right away. I had other medical complications making it difficult to hold my son to breastfeed. The nurses discouraged my husband and me from giving my son a bottle and fed my son with a very tiny amount of formula in a cup. My husband struggled to feed Jakob this way and he went several hours without drinking any significant amount of formula. I was committed to breastfeeding and stuck to the plan of very tiny amounts of formula without using a nipple. I trusted the hospital staff to do the best thing for me and my son. The baby began showing signs of hypoglycemia and was not crying, only grunting the first 12 hours of his life. The doctor decided to admit my baby to the NICU. While he was in the NICU, Jakob was fed by bottle and showed immediate signs of improvement. My baby was discharged out of the NICU and back at my bedside within 24 hours. My husband and I continued to follow the discharge instructions from the NICU, which were to feed the baby with the same amount of formula as he was getting in the NICU when breastfeeding was not successful. We were both scolded by the nurses, being told that we were feeding our son too much.   The postpartum nurse stated that, “The NICU does things different than we do. They feed the babies too much and do so using a bottle. We promote breastfeeding alone.” Continue reading →

By Paula 

After undergoing five years of infertility, my son was born on November 27, 2012.  He was a strong, healthy boy weighing in at 9 lbs 7 oz and 21 inches long.  I had an easy pregnancy, no health issues and delivered him without any medication, without even an IV, with a midwife in a hospital.

He latched on and nursed, just as expected.  However, because of his size he needed hourly blood sugar monitoring to be sure he’d maintain his sugars.  The delivery nurse recommended giving him some formula after nursing to avoid the NICU.  I also did skin to skin, his sugars stabilized enough that I was able to stop supplementing and he stopped getting the heel sticks a few hours after birth. Continue reading →

I wrote this piece over thirteen years ago, at the time thinking of publishing it as a New York Times Op Ed but eventually losing the courage to do so. The subject was just too raw and painful. Next month my son will be fourteen. He is wonderful and healthy but has severe ADHD and learning disabilities that have shaped his and our life everyday since he was born and will continue to shape them always. I will never know the effects of what I now call the breastfeeding conspiracy on my son. I know that he had, and still has, low muscle tone, which may have caused his inability to suck properly in his first days of life. Or it may be that this and other setbacks were the result of the dehydration he suffered when I insisted on “not giving him a bottle” in those first (near-}fatal days of his life. Continue reading →