Do we scare women with all the advice?

I did that. I drew the curtains to feed Coby. I wanted to "get the hang of it" by myself. With no one else able to see. It was our private time together.

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How did the woman feel about you hand expressing? It's not ideal I know, and in a normal situation I wouldn't dream of it. However, 16hours is a while and if the woman didn't mind, then it is better than the baby having formula milk.

And the outcome was positive as the woman was then able to hand express herself and hopefully felt much more positive about everyting.


I do think there are always going to be cases when we have to do things we normally wouldn't so long as the woman has consented.



I'll never forget when I had my daughter. She was on SCBU and because I'd had Gestational Diabetes they had to ensure she had early feeding. However, I was never asked if she could have formula, they just tube fed her it and when it came to breastfeeding it was awful.

They would squeeze my nipple so hard and force her face into it! When that didn't work, they put a bottle teat over my nipple! I hand expressed what I could, but it was over before it started She never took to breastfeeding, she would not latch on. I was heartbroken.
However when I had my son 8 years later, he was the opposite. He breastfed ell within the hour and we never looked back. I breastfed him for over a year. It wasn't easy, especially at first. He sucked so hard the first minute would bring tears to my eyes, but we did it and I felt fantastic for it

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If babies needed hands to guide them out,
wouldn't women be born with an extra pair
attached to their inner thighs?

I confess I had the curtains permenantly drawn during my 2 day stay after birth (other than when a MCA decided i wasn't socialising enough and pulled them back). Mainly because I was the only Mum breastfeeding, the other 3 all FF. I was having difficulties so quite often had my baby screaming for a long time while I attempted to latch him on while waiting on a midwife coming to help.

Anyway, where I am we have community mothers who visit the hospital (generally without baby though) to help new Mums. They are great and the midwives looked really relieved to see them.

As for food advise, IMO it seems to make woman annoyed more than anxious/worried. i.e. 'oh here is something else the Government is informing us we can't eat'. (Maybe I've just been around too many cynical pregnant people!)

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Quite bad when you read that article, great find Sassy, its difficult isn't it?
On the one hand, we cannot give enough information thus allowing the woman to make a fully informed choice as to whether or not the statistics/risks are real/enough to deter her from eating certain foods, on the other hand we now give so much information that there is the tendency to "overload" women, and I imagine only a small amount actually sinks in. Damned if we do, damned if we don't!!

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I think the information is bewildering around foods to eat / avoid. I always start my spiel with an explanation of why - that your immunity is reduced in pregnancy so you need to be extra vigilant to protect yourself against food poisoning. For me it's about common-sense, more than avoiding certain foods. Whilst I'd normally happily eat foods that were 2-3 days out of date if they looked OK, I'd not do so in pregnancy, and would urge mothers to act the same way.

I spoke to someone about the Lion eggs thing, and it seems that though the inside of the egg is salmonella free, the outside of the shell maybe be contaminated with salmonella. So, even with the stamp you are not truly guaranteed a salmonella-free experience. So what's the point????

I think the most important part of that article was the last 2 paragraphs - it doesn't happen very often!!!

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By the time I had Jack I had only stopped breastfeeding Chloe for about 2 months so it was not hard to start up again and all the midwives just left me to it. In the cubicle next to me there was a new mum really struggling to breastfeed and I wanted so many times to ask her if I could help but I didn't because I would have hated to have embarrassed her or interfered. I think seeing how other women breastfeed could really help women though, hmmmm but I can see how it might make women feel incapable, very difficult!!
x x x

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Decided to postpone my application to 2010 for Beds and ARU x x x

Sassy, the lady seemed fine with it relieved that someone was helping her out i think because she didn't appear to have had much support the day before. She was happy for me to do it though, and we just chatted about other things whilst we were getting on with it so it wasn't awkward or embarrassing, i just feel a bit bad because i always vowed never to milk a woman because i thought it would undermine her confidence as a mum and be embarrassing for her, but like you said our main concern was for the baby.

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"With my hands, i have felt the strength it takes to grow, and release new spirit......."
"All the best births are the ones where you only have time to record times on a paper towel..."- a midwife, somewhere in the middle

i think this is a great idea. I'm 11 months 2 weeks feeding my second child (shock horror I"m still at it!) after giving up after 24 hours on my first, mainly because the midwives I had first time around kept grabbing my breast and shoving it in my sons mouth and gave up when I"d had enough of my nipples being tweaked by them!
I did a breastfeeding class before I gave birth to my daughter and have often thought how wonderful it would have been to see a mother breastfeeding, there is only so much you can learn about latch from looking at videos and pictures, see it for real really helps.

I should add, my daughter is an acrobatic feeder from the early days, there was no way she was going to keep my dignity and there was no way I was going to quit or hide away in the house until she stopped, so I got over the 'shyness'

My youngest son was 18 months old when I stopped feeding him...only at bed time by then though. The only reason I stopped then was because he bit me lol.

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Midwifemissy x

Student Midwife 2007
Student uni rep
Educational Resources Manager

PAB Support Worker

Hi All,

Alongside the article and breastfeeding discussion, the general point of how much information to give is quite an interesting one to think about in its own right.

I teach parent ed classes at the hospital - the classes are very popular as they are the only NHS ones in the area that are in the evenings, and I usually have 10 - 14 couples, mainly first time parents although we do sometimes get couples where one partner has had a child in a previous relationship. Time in the classes is quite tight, as we keep having our provision reduced. We have to cover as much as we can about pregnancy, birth, pain relief and afterwards, we have three two hour sessions which includes a tour of the maternity unit which takes up half of one session. I feel that if I skim the surface and don't go into any depth I am doing the couple a disservice as I'm not giving them any kind of preparation for anything, but if I go into too much depth, it both reduces the time we can spend on other things, and also tends to scare them silly. I tend to try to make three or four points on each issue, then discuss around any questions that are ask, so making the sessions kind of group led, but the whole concept of how much detail they need/want can be quite tricky...

Sorry to go off topic, but this is something that has been on my mind the last couple of weeks - I think because I've had a very fresh pair of eyes with me for this last set of classes which has made me look at what I do from a bit of a different perspective!

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