Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Circumcision Disrupts Breastfeeding

I'm stealing quotes to pin on Pinterest, but there's no image (AGAIN), so I need to re-post it with an image.

This all came from NOCIRC.ORG.






Postoperative Pain, Stress, and Exhaustion

Human milk is the best food for babies.1,3 Babies who are breastfed are more likely to experience optimum health and well-being throughout life than babies who are given a substitute for mother's milk. It is imperative, therefore, that nothing be done that would interfere with successful initiation and completion of breastfeeding during, at least, the first year of life. Mothers need full information, well in advance of birth, so that they may avoid the pitfalls and snares that prevent success in breastfeeding.

We now know that newborn babies are born with fully functioning pain pathways.23 Infants exhibit greater physiologic responses to pain than do adult subjects.23 Male neonatal circumcision has been documented to be an extremely painful, distressing, traumatic, and exhausting experience for a newborn male infant.24-28 Circumcision disrupts the baby's normal sleep patterns.25,27 Post-operatively, the circumcised infant is in pain and is in an exhausted, weakened, and debilitated condition.28 Most importantly, the circumcision procedure frequently causes the newborn to withdraw from his environment,25 thus interfering with his process of bonding and breastfeeding.28

La Leche League International (LLLI) first reported problems with breastfeeding by circumcised male infants in 1981.30 Circumcision has long-lasting postoperative pain that continues for days after the surgical event.29 Howard et al. found that some male babies are unable to suckle the mother's breast after circumcision,29 thus confirming the LLLI report.30

The Workgroup on Breastfeeding of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that stressful procedures that interfere with breastfeeding be avoided.3

Breastfeeding problems among circumcised male infants have been verified by lactation consultants.31,32 Parents may avoid creating this problem simply by refusing to consent to the circumcision of their baby boy. In doing so, they would also be adopting the recommendations of the AAP and LLLI to avoid stressful procedures.3,30 Mothers who protect their new baby from circumcision are more likely, therefore, to be

successful in breastfeeding and less likely to have to resort to providing breast milk substitute.3,29,30

I'm not posting all of it, because this is what I need. Click THIS LINK to find what I was looking at.

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