Marc Antonio and J.Lo



Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Circumcision and breastfeeding complications - a connection?

My wife and I were completely fascinated by this article from Mothering online. It states that there is over twenty years of documentation proving the connection between circumcised infant boys and trouble with breastfeeding them, basically because the boys become unresponsive.

Now, I know this is probably not everyone's experience (and I am sure you'll all be telling me this in your comments!), but my wife and I thought about all of the baby boys and breastfeeding mothers that we know. We and one other family we know did not circumcise our sons, and we are the only two families we know who had success breastfeeding, in that latch and supply were never a problem. Since we know a lot of families who recently had boys, this was an easy comparison for us. All the other families were either unable to breastfeed at all because their babies would not latch (of course, the argument could be made that they didn't get enough support to stick with the breastfeeding) or they needed to supplement with formula, because their baby's suck response was so weak that the mothers could not produce enough milk. Now I know there could be plenty of other contributing factors to these conditions, but in light of this new information to us, we found it very interesting.