Do I really need to pump breastmilk?

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Ok, so this was a question that seriously no one had a good answer to which I always thought was weird. They push breast pumps on you like nobody’s business, but who needs one and what is the benefit of pumping?

What is a breast pump?

For a lack of a less crude way to put it, do you know how cow farmers pump milk? It’s that same thing, but on you. There are electric varieties as well as manual ones, but the idea is still the same: it’s a device designed to get milk out of your boob and into a bottle.

If motherhood didn’t sound super glamorous already, add this to the list—you get to be a cow. Literally.

Ok, so that’s cool. So who needs to pump?

If you plan to breastfeed and go back to work

This is the primary reason women decide to pump. If you think that you would like to breastfeed your baby past your maternity leave and must go back to work, pumping will allow you to do that for several reasons.

One is obvious, you can’t be there to let the baby suck the milk out, so you need to express the milk into a bottle so your caregiver can feed it to them. Simple.

Another is that regular pumping will allow you to continue to breastfeed even if you’re not with baby all the time. So the way your boob works, is it continues to produce milk as long as milk is being emptied out of your boob. Think of it like a tap right, like you wouldn’t refill it unless it was empty, and the less frequently it’s being emptied it signals to your body that hey, we don’t need that much milk, so stop making it. That’s what the whole “drying up” is referring to. So to ensure that you are emptying your milk factory, you need to pump as much as your baby feeds—so if your baby is eating say every 4 hours, you also want to pump every 4 hours, because you want production to match the consumption. Simple, right?

With that said, I have to preface here that pumping at work is HARD. You may have to demand your workplace to provide a safe pumping area (because look, I don’t want to eat in a bathroom so neither should my baby have to drink milk pumped in one) and to allow you time to pump without distractions. Some women also have a hard time expressing milk when the baby isn’t around, or experience hormone waves when your milk lets down (which is what you call it when the milk faucet is turned on). So definitely give yourself grace and cut yourself slack if it gets super hard.

If you plan to breastfeed and stay home

So one may think, ok, so I get that if I have to have some physical distance between my baby then sure, maybe I do need to pump. Are there any benefits to pumping if I plan to be imprisoned with my baby at home? (only half-kidding here, it does feel like a prison sometimes) There are a few scenarios where pumping could be beneficial, but before I get into that here’s a quick chart of the pros and cons of breastfeeding from your boob and feeding your baby expressed breastmilk.

…soooo the takeaway is, they both suck?

Yes. Pun intended.

There are, some key differences here. There has been studies that showed there’s an immunity feedback loop between your milk and infant—yea, your boob senses the baby’s saliva and produces customized milk to-order. Crazy, right? This comes in handy for things like when baby is about to get sick, or going through a growth spurt, or just simply growing up, because their needs change

While exclusively pumping would not allow for this direct boob-to-baby communication, it still is breastmilk, which has the benefits even in its generic state. So if it’s important to you that you are the baby’s food source without being confined to the feeding itself, pumping could be an option.

But yes, they both suck.

And no, formula is not exempt from this and still sucks because we supplemented with formula for the first couple weeks with Lu and that was super annoying too. Like a pump, you’re washing the bottles all the time, and worst of all, formula only lasts for like 2 hours and it goes bad, which means that if your baby is an asshole and only takes a sip before getting tired and going back to sleep (which happens ALL THE TIME) you have to go through the trouble of boiling water, letting the water cool, then adding formula, then mixing, then checking the temp, then realizing it’s now too cold and warm it up… AGAIN.

On the other hand, you can leave out breastmilk for like 4 hours or even refrigerate for like half a day even after they drank some of iit, which is HUGE that you can reuse the milk for the next feeding.

With that said, why might you still want to pump when you’re home?

If you plan to breastfeed and stay home but: You are overproducing

This is going to be hard to predict, but more likely than not, people who successfully breastfeed tend to overproduce in those first few weeks. Think of your boob as that super enthusiastic classmate at the beginning of the school year who is like SUPER INTO IT and go all out on the group project to the point where it’s like, hard to keep up or listen because they’re screaming the entire time. What ends up happening is there’s way too much milk and maybe your baby is still getting used to breastfeeding so they can’t empty the boob adequately either which then leads to plugged ducts and mastitis which you will want to Google then cry. But don’t let that scare you from breastfeeding.

In comes pumping. So the tricky line here is again, the boob will keep producing milk as long as the breast is emptied. Which means that if you pump too much, you may trigger your boob to make more and thus worsen the overproduction. The key here is to not increase your emptying session, but treat it almost like an assist for the baby, pumping AFTER you’ve already fed baby. What this also does is gets rid of this milk for the next feeding, which at that point will be “old milk” which some babies don’t like because they’re suddenly connoisseurs of milk and very picky about the freshness (who are they, pompous assholes at a sushi restaurant?). Also if you decide to REPLACE a feeding with a pumping session because you just kind of want to reset the boob, again do it when the baby feeds and not as an extra session.

Pumping can actually help in the opposite scenario too…

If you plan to breastfeed and stay home but: You feel like you’re not producing enough

You may feel like you’re not producing enough if baby seems like they’re not satisfied or you’re looking to build a “stash” of milk to freeze. In this case, adding a pumping session to trick your boob into thinking the baby is feeding MORE will incite additional milk production. Nifty, right?

Ok so maybe you don’t really care about your production level, does pumping also have any other benefits?

If you want to feed them breastmilk and stay home but: You don’t want to be the sole food source

This is a big one. And you can do this two ways, where you nurse at the breast and also feed the expressed breastmilk using a bottle, or you exclusively pump and feed exclusively with a bottle. I really couldn’t find any resources to say where one was better than the other, although the latter is definitely more washing. You do, however, allow your partner to be a part of the feeding which is an amazing benefit of formula that you can borrow in your feeding journey.

Well none of this applies to me which means I don’t have to pump?

Maybe. Baby registry sites and breast pump makers will obviously disagree, but it’s definitely not a must. In fact, many insurance policies cover for a free breast pump (although quality is not always guaranteed with the freebies) so you could even just wait to get the free one, try it out, then invest in one if it works into your style. Just for reference I personally bought my own and invested in a good one because I felt like I wanted to build a “freezer stash” to have as a backup for whatever emergency that I couldn’t think of. Well I ended up having to throw away like hundreds of ounces off milk because we never needed it LOL but it ended up being great for me because I was overproducing.

Ok I’m ready for a pump, what are my options?

I personally have never tried the wearables like Willow and Elvie, but they seem like a great choice for moms who are looking to pump in the workplace, or have a little toddler to chase around so need to be able to pump on the go.

The pump I have is the Spectra S1 Plus, which I talk a little about in this post as well but I basically went for the model that could be used without a plug and 1000% recommend that.

Where can I learn more about pumping from like… not Lisa? (no offense)

Everything I learned about breastfeeding I read on KellyMom.com as well as the Legendairy Milk instagram account. They were both amazing resources, KellyMom was super sweet and supportive, Legendairy was informative and hilarious. Make sure to follow/bookmark them both as you’re thinking about breastfeeding and also when you’re in the thick of it at 3am and you’re thinking like, why is this so hard when animals and women have doing it for millennia, like what is wrong with me? Don’t worry, it’s gonna end up fine.

Because remember, if your baby is alive, you are doing everything you need to be doing. Everything else is extra.