Leslie Carol Botha: Elizabeth Kissling has shared a stunning revelation about adoptive mother’s risking their health to experience the act of lactation. Although understandable…. the risk to not only their health – but the health of their adoptive child - has to outweigh the benefits. Most women do not even know about this “immortal bit of testimony from the Nelson Pill hearings in 1970, Estrogen is to cancer what fertilizer is to wheat.”
Society for Menstrual Cycle Research
re: Cycling
Blog of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research
When Breastfeeding Isn’t Best
August 8th, 2012 by Elizabeth Kissling
Let me say up front that I have limited direct experience with adoption. Some members of my extended family have adopted children, another has given up an infant for adoption, and I have friends who have adopted children, and other friends who are adopted. It was one of those adopted friends who pointed me to this uncritical article from last fall about the practice of adoptive mothers ‘learning’ to breastfeed.
I’ve placed learning in scare quotes because this article isn’t about adoptive mothers developing a skill. It’s about taking high-risk drugs so that they can have the experience of breastfeeding their adopted children, even though they will be unable to produce enough breastmilk to nurse exclusively. But by taking combined oral contraceptives continuously for several months (which, contrary to the popular belief asserted in the article, does not “trick the body into thinking it’s pregnant”) and following up with domperidone, an antiemitic drug which sometimes has the side effect of causing lactation — even in men — some adoptive mothers are able to force their bodies to lactate.
