Sunday, March 7, 2010

Breast Feeding the Wrong Child

Moms - if you breastfed your baby(ies) and you found out that a mix up in the hospital caused you to nurse another woman's infant, how would you react? Is it gross? Is it more concerning about the mix up than anything else? Is it something worth suing about?

Baby mix ups have happened from time to time. We like to think that we've got fool-proof methods in place, but mix ups still occur. According to this article, such an incident is sue-worthy: Breast-Feeding the Wrong Baby.

The article explains how a nurse brought the wrong baby to a mother who went on to breast feed the child. Well over a year later, the mother who did the nursing has filed a 30,000 dollar lawsuit against the hospital. Did you get that first part? *Over* a year later.

Here are my thoughts:

1- I nursed three children and I could identify all three from the day they were born. I find it highly unlikely I would not recognize my own child.

2- If the situation was so traumatizing for the mother, why wait a whole year (actually, more) before launching a lawsuit?

3- Is it really that terrible that one child receive another (healthy) mother's breast milk? We used to have wet nurses, women still do nurse others' babies for a variety of reasons, and we have breast milk banks for premature babies.

and finally, the biggie for me:

4- Should the mother of the mistakenly nursed baby be the one who is freaked out and suing?

It's the last point that really makes me wonder.

What do you think?

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1 comment:

Tracey said...

If anyone should get upset, it should be the mother of the baby that was breastfed by a stranger (not knowing what the medical condition of that woman is). This happened to my sister-in-law years ago. She was the woman who breastfed a strange baby in hospital (handed to her by a nurse in the dark and she was tired and didn't notice until she was burping the baby). The concern was for the mother of the baby, reassuring her that my sister-in-law was perfectly healthy (she was). It's a mistake that shouldn't happen, but I can see how it does.