Review: Making More Milk by Lisa Marasco and Diana West

Source: Goodreads

I found this book by reading The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, a La Leche League bestseller. It sparked my interest immediately, as it was mentioned under the small section about insufficient glandular tissue, which is something that has been mentioned as a possible explanation of my breastfeeding issues.

This book starts off with an introduction that already made it worth to read for me. It glows understanding, compassion and love towards women struggling with low milk supply and all the feelings and troubles relating to that. Following that, the book is divided into five parts, from investigating your milk supply and causes of low milk production to making the most of what you have and increasing milk supply.

The first chapters are extremely necessary in order to understand the book. The first chapter explains how milk production works, that it is dependant on, including the infamous milk supply equation that has been explained to me by a lactation consultant but not in such detail. What it comes down to is that sufficient milk supply is dependant on several matters, such as sufficient glandular tissue, hormones, good frequent milk removal and the absence of other inhibiting issues. Next chapters explain how to understand if the supply is truly low, as (first-time) mothers often have doubts if they are actually making enough milk.

I also like how all the causes of low milk production and what to do is explained well with a sufficient amount of information, references and extra material what you can look up on the internet. This book comes with several dozens of pages of references! Very interesting chapters about lactation in adoptive parents, transgender people and co-parents are added, compared to the previous edition. Regarding gender and roles, careful language is used, preferring '(lactating) parent' over 'mother'.

What I don't like? The book has a bit of a (for me) hippish manner at times, a lot of the things that I might not trust myself, such as chiropractor treatment, reflexology and such are mentioned and recommended. It is, again, a book from the US, so not all the information can be taken over to a European context, for example, births are less medicated in many countries in Europe than in the US and obtaining domperidon is easier.

But what I liked the most is the non-judgemental and supportive way of how this book is written. Every sentence brings about a message that a parent feeding their baby is doing a great job, it is not about the amounts of breastmilk given, but the effort to do that. I loved the chapter on coping with low milk supply, as this explains so much of what I have been feeling and brings it into words. The book finishes off with a chapter on what to do the next time. There is always hope, it is important to remember that!