Breastfeeding and Adoption

Women all over the world have been breastfeeding children, and doing so without a pregnancy first for centuries. Some women are wet nurses, others care for grandbabies, some change their minds about weaning after the fact, and some adopt.

I love all that breastfeeding provides for mother and child. The antibodies, perfect nutrition, mother-child bonding, jaw development, digestive tract health, and comfort breastfeeding provides can't be fully replaced. For the adopted child, the ease of bonding through breastfeeding is especially beneficial after the trauma of adoption. Each newborn knows his mother's voice and smell, and knows that he is dependent upon her. But he has no emotional maturity, so even at a day old when he doesn't understand much of anything, the loss of his birth mother is traumatic.

So it's natural for me to want to breastfeed, should God give us a child this year. I won't be able to nurse our adopted baby until after placement, at the earliest 24 hours after birth. This will add a little difficulty to learning to nurse, especially since he is likely to be born earlier than ideal through induction. But this shouldn't create any problems that last more than 2 weeks.

I have found a few good resources on adoptive breastfeeding:
1. La Leche League web pages on the subject
2. The Adoptive Breastfeeding Resourse Website
3. World Health Organization's article, "Relactation"

I was pleased to learn most women who try to induce lactation do so after just a week of nursing and are able to breastfeed exclusively (no supplements) within a month (ref #3 above)! Well, adopting women are a little less successful than the others. Yet I think my chances for exclusive breastfeeding are good since Ben is still nursing and I'm not starting dry.

I plan to pump ahead of time, increasing the "demand", so that my "supply" follows. The replacement parts I ordered for my pump (Medela Harmony) arrived today, so I'm ready to start! A newborn nurses every hour or two and through the night, but I think I'll go with just a few times during the day and once, maybe twice, a night, in addition to Ben's nursing to sleep. These sessions will stock our freezer. If I'm supplementing more than half of our baby's milk a month after placement--after lots of sling time, nursing, and skin-to-skin contact, and after avoiding bottles and pacifiers--I may consider using herbal lactogogues (Brewer's yeast, fenugreek) to increase my milk supply. Some women start months before the adoption with hormones that simulate pregnancy, but that's not for me.

Through all this, I'll have to make sure our baby is getting enough milk. That's easy enough by watching diapers (at least 6 wet ones a day) and weekly weight gain. Just in case, I'll probably start nursing and supplementing with stored breastmilk and then formula. Supplementers--itty bitty straws through which babies drink supplemental milk while nursing--are very affordable and have been around for a long time. They will help increase the chance of me being able to exclusively breastfeed.

Why even try to exclusively breastfeed? Doctors recommend it for at least 6 months, and it would be nice not to have to deal with the hassle of bottles and expense of formula. So it's worth trying the hassle and expense of a supplementer. If it doesn't work out, that's fine, but I'll do what I can to at least give it a try.