Feed the baby … not the freezer!

So many women are under unnecessary stress because they can't express extra breastmilk to build a #freezerstash

Let's take a moment to unpack this: a mother is breastfeeding well. Her baby is thriving. But she feels she is failing because she isn't producing more milk than her baby requires! Breastfeeding is about supply and demand. The baby's feedback to the breast, through the removal of milk during a feed, drives milk production.

Until around the 1990s, Australian mothers generally only expressed breastmilk if their baby was sick or premature and unable to direct feed. Or her breasts were too engorged for her baby to attach. Other reasons to express were less common: separation due to work, study or social commitments etc. Electric breast pumps were only available by hire and often reserved for those with babies in special care nurseries. Hand pumps and hand expressing were sufficient for most mothers. Expressed milk might be frozen in small amounts but disposable bags were expensive and hard to get and freezer space was at a premium.

However, in the US, women had very different experiences of breastfeeding. With little to no maternity leave, poor breastfeeding support in the community and limited access to help with lactation issues, pumping was already becoming a normal part of breastfeeding for the minority of women who managed to establish it.

In many ways, the internet is to blame for the influence of US culture on breastfeeding mothers in Australia. Pumping to build a freezer stash before returning to work is necessary for women with just days or weeks at home with their baby. But Australian mothers have 18 weeks paid maternity leave, plus other benefits not available in the USA. They do not face the same urgency or many of the same barriers.

Social media has normalised extreme pumping of breastmilk to an extent that sometimes babies are completely absent from the picture. Aspirations to have the biggest and most impressive stash of expressed milk can overtake the goal of a small reserve just in case. Informal milk sharing groups regularly have posts from mothers seeking to give away tens of litres of milk to reclaim freezer space!