Smoking and breastfeeding just don’t go together and what many women need these days is a clear and concise factsheet on how to get off the dreaded weed for the good of themselves and their unborn baby.
Women can still learn to live with these risks for the most part, if it weren’t for the problem of pregnancy. Breastfeeding and smoking alongside hardly makes anyone feel good, least of all the baby.
Of course there is a lot of sanctimonious preaching out there that you could read up any time you want to be lectured, but let’s have some practical thoughts in this area. As hard as they try, some women just can’t quit. How does it help to just make them feel bad about themselves?
We could just, instead, talk about how to minimize the effects on the baby of smoking and breast-feeding at the same time. To begin with, it isn’t a good idea to just stay away from breast-feeding if you wish to smoke after childbirth. Nicotine in the milk is not an ideal situation of course, but the nutrition and the resistance to disease that it helps the baby with, are certainly noted to bring on greater benefits than risks. If anything should make a nursing mother guilty, it should be quitting nursing, and not smoking alongside of it.
Of course, when you are smoking and breast-feeding at the same time, the quantity of milk produced can tend towards the lower side; the quality of the milk tends to change too. Breast milk in smoking mothers tends to have less iodine, and less prolactin, a hormone that the baby needs to digest the milk properly. Lactation also tends to stop earlier.
So how do you minimize whatever risk that smoking and breastfeeding together bring? To begin with, you need to at least cut down. The smaller the smoking habit, the smaller the risk to your baby. Smoking right before breast-feeding or during it can actually be dangerous to your baby – can put a lot of nicotine in your milk. A good rule of thumb is to wait about two hours between smoke and a breast-feeding round.
That’s as long as it takes for the body to get rid of all the nicotine. But if you think about it, it just happens to be an unpleasant truth that recreational drugs, marijuana and the like are not to be ruled out as possibilities for breast-feeding mothers either. Among poorer mothers, this just happens to be a fact of life, whether or not we like it (actually, they say one in five pregnant women use it, how’s that?).
These drugs are really addictive, and they say that it can actually change the shape of the baby’s brain. If a mother is able to be sober enough to observe proper cleanliness when mixing formula for the baby, that is far better than breast-feeding. Well this is what they call a dilemma – being in a position where he has to make a choice between two equally unacceptable alternatives. But that is life, isn’t it?