Study shows birth trauma can impact new mothers' ability to breastfeed

Up to a third of all new mothers report suffering through a traumatic child birth.

For some – believed to be up to 9 percent – the birth is such a traumatic event that they experience posttraumatic stress disorder, the same debilitating disorder that scars the lives of combat veterans and victims of rape and other violent crimes.

This frightening and debilitating disorder can cause women to abandon their aspirations for future children, damage their ability to bond with their babies, and leave them permanently psychologically scarred.

Cheryl Tatano Beck, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Nursing, is one of the country’s leading experts on posttraumatic stress disorder and childbirth. She has spent the past 20 years studying postpartum depression mood and anxiety disorders.

In her latest findings, Beck has found that birth trauma can have an adverse impact on some women’s ability to breastfeed.

Working closely with the Trauma and Birth Stress charitable trust in Auckland, New Zealand, Beck evaluated the detailed responses of 52 mothers who participated in her research project.

Her results showed that the impact of birth trauma can lead new mothers down two strikingly different paths with regard to breastfeeding.

For some, the trauma propels them into persevering in breastfeeding to prove their “success” as a mother and perhaps to make up to their infant for the difficult birth.

As one mother in Beck’s study who had had an emergency Caesarean said, “Breastfeeding became my focus for overcoming the birth and proving to everyone else and mostly to myself that there was something that I could do right. It was part of my crusade, so to speak, to prove myself as a mother.”

Yet for others, birth trauma sets in motion a chain of events – intrusive flashbacks, detachment from their child, and physical pain – that can curtail their attempts to breastfeed.