- An occasional drink is OK a couple weeks after delivery.
- You don’t need to pump and dump.
- Think of your breastmilk as being the same as your blood. If there's enough alcohol in your blood that you feel tipsy, there's alcohol in your breastmilk also. Don't feed that milk to your baby. Wait a couple hours and the alcohol will clear from your breastmilk as it clears from your blood. When you feel normal, the milk is safe for your baby to drink.
- In other words, wait 2 to 2½ hours per drink (12oz regular beer, 5oz wine, 1½ oz liquor) before nursing again.
- Nursing or pumping within 1 hour before a drink may reduce the alcohol amount in breastmilk afterwards.
- If you don’t wait after drinking as recommended, side effects can occur.
- Baby may be fussy and sleep poorly.
- More than 1 drink daily may affect infant growth, development and motor function.
- Heavy drinking may cause excessive sedation, fluid retention, and hormone imbalances in infants.
- Alcohol does NOT increase milk production. It may increase prolactin levels, but decreases oxytocin, the hormone which controls milk let-down, so less milk flows to the baby during nursing. This is Mother Nature’s way of protecting a baby from alcohol.
- Antabus, a drug used to reduce alcohol cravings in alcoholics, is NOT compatible with nursing.
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