Parents from the Fed is Best Infant Feeding Support group have told us that their prenatal education didn’t prepare them for the realities of breastfeeding and didn’t teach them the education they wanted and needed. They want other families to be informed to have a safe and positive breast/chestfeeding experience. This is what they said:
“It’s really, really difficult!”
On August 11, 2020, Dr. Nicole King, Anesthesiologist, Critical Care Intensivist, Patient Safety Expert and Senior Advisor to the Fed is Best Foundation spoke at the USDA Scientific Report of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee meeting warning of the dangers and patient rights violations of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative. Watch her address below.
Good afternoon, my name is Nicole King and I am a mother and a physician. As an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician, I am faced with life and death circumstances every day. In no way did I ever consider breastfeeding my child would be as stressful as supporting a COVID patient through their critical illness. Five years ago, I realized how wrong I was.
I had a beautiful, healthy pregnancy with Bryson, with the help of Clomid (a fertility drug), like my first pregnancy with my daughter. After about 31 hours of induced labor, Bryson was here. Seven pounds, twelve ounces, and seemingly healthy! He latched like a champ immediately, and we had zero complications of any sort while in the hospital. He had wet and dirty diapers and was breastfeeding well, every 2–3 hours. His discharge weight was 7 lbs, and I had a follow-up appointment scheduled for two days later.
NEWT is the first tool that allows pediatric healthcare providers and parents to see how a newborn’s weight during the first days and weeks following childbirth compares with a large sample of newborns, which can help with early identification of weight loss and weight gain issues. Bryson was discharged with a weight loss of 9.7 percent at 36 hours of age. The NEWT graph indicates his weight loss was excessive.
Dear BFUSA,
Thank you for your long-overdue public acknowledgment endorsing what the Fed Is Best Foundation has been fiercely advocating for over the past 3 years.
According to your recent blog post you now agree with us that:
BFUSA: “Delayed lactogenesis is actually increasingly common because the risk factors for it are potentially increasing,” Dr. Rosen-Carole says. “When a baby is born into that situation, the goal is to closely monitor what the baby is doing, instead of giving a bottle right away. “If the baby is hungry and they’re not getting enough milk out of the mother’s breast, then they need to be supplemented,” she says.
This is my baby girl in NICU. She developed a high fever, jaundice, and dehydration with a 10.1% weight loss 56 hours after birth while exclusively breastfeeding in a ‘Baby-Friendly’ hospital.
During our stay, the hospital pediatrician saw my baby twice a day but he failed to inform us she had a 7.2% weight loss in the 30th hour of life. Hence, we were not given the information to decide if we should supplement with formula.
According to a review published in the Journal Of Family Practice in June 2018, “exclusive breastfeeding at discharge from the hospital is likely the single greatest risk factor for hospital readmission in newborns. Term infants who are exclusively breastfed are more likely to be hospitalized compared to formula-fed or mixed-fed infants, due to hyperbilirubinemia, dehydration, hypernatremia, and weight loss.” They estimated that for every 71 infants that are exclusively breastfed, one is hospitalized for serious feeding complications.
