Can I breastfeed when I have been drinking alcohol?
While it would be nice to think that you would only eat pure organic wholefoods and drink filtered water for the duration of your pregnancy and then your time breastfeeding - and indeed throughout your whole life, to maintain your optimum health and condition - there are times when we all want to 'let our hair down' and for many this includes a night out and several drinks!
There is plenty of misinformation about alcohol and breastfeeding 'out there': amongst the most common is that baby will get everything you get yourself, so that breastfeeding mums need to abstain from breastfeeding their babies until the alcohol has completely left their systems, and that the milk they make in the meantime will be tainted so needs to be discarded - the so-called 'pump and dump'.
In actual fact, alcohol disappears from any milk you produce at the same rate as it does from blood, ie roughly a unit an hour - so if you start drinking at 8pm, and have 2 units an hour till midnight, (so, 8 units) then by about 4am you would have no alcohol left in your system to be present in your milk. If you think it's ok to BF with 2 units in your system then anytime after 2am you could BF.
Also remember milk is produced WHEN it is needed, and drawn from matter in the tissues at that point, so regardless what has been in your body in the time since you last breastfed, it is only what is actually in your body WHEN you are producing the milk (whether breastfeeding or expressing), which matters.
The BfN's drugline has a brilliant factsheet about alcohol and breastfeeding that you might find useful.
Shel: My personal rule is that I never get so drunk I couldn't be in charge of my baby, and therefore I am sober enough to BF. The baby wouldn't get DRUNK off your BM when you'd been drinking, it just appears as a toxin and may make the milk taste different - but I've had no refusals yet!