Birth Savvy Bub Savvy

16/10/2026

“Your baby has lost more than 10%. We need to start top-ups.”

I hear this so often: a baby crosses a weight-loss threshold, a top-up protocol kicks in, and suddenly parents are questioning whether breastfeeding is working.

But for an otherwise healthy term newborn, more than 10% weight loss should trigger a thorough assessment and skilled breastfeeding support, rather than automatic supplementation.

The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine’s Protocol #3 states:

“Ten per cent weight loss is not an automatic marker for the need for supplementation but is an indicator for infant evaluation.”

Why does this distinction matter?

Unnecessary top-ups can mean less feeding at the breast and less breast stimulation, which can reduce milk production. They can also undermine a mother’s confidence. Early formula supplementation is associated with shorter breastfeeding duration. And there is emerging evidence that it increases food allergies. (Bhasin et al. 2026)

A recommendation intended to help can therefore make breastfeeding harder, particularly when the underlying difficulty hasn’t been addressed.

And has anyone asked about IV fluids during labour or birth?

Fluids given to mum through a drip may also affect the baby’s fluid balance. Some babies may carry extra fluid when their birth weight is recorded, then pass it as urine after birth.

That temporarily higher starting weight can make the percentage lost afterwards look larger. Some early weight loss may therefore reflect fluid shifts, rather than insufficient milk intake.

Parents deserve more than a top-up instruction.

They deserve someone with breastfeeding expertise to watch a feed, assess milk transfer, consider baby’s age, nappies and overall wellbeing, and provide practical help.

When extra milk is needed, the plan should also support milk production, address feeding difficulties and include follow-up.

You can ask:

💬 “What, alongside the weight loss, suggests my baby needs extra milk?”

💬 “Have the IV fluids I received been considered?”

💬 “Can someone with breastfeeding expertise watch a full feed?”

💬 “If top-ups are needed, how will you help me protect my supply, and when will you review them?”

If you followed advice to supplement, you did what you believed was best for your baby. The responsibility sits with services to provide thorough assessment, clear explanations and skilled support.

Hospital protocols should protect babies while supporting breastfeeding. A percentage should prompt us to investigate, rather than automatically determine the top-up feeding plan.

Save this for your birth preparation, or share it with someone supporting new parents.

Reference: Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, Clinical Protocol #3: Supplementary Feedings in the Healthy Term Breastfed Neonate (2017).

Bhasin M, Cooper M, Macchiaverni P, Joys RS, O'Sullivan TA, Keelan JA, Venter C, Palmer DJ, Lowe AJ, Prescott SL, Silva D, Verhasselt V. Colostrum as a Protective Factor Against Peanut Allergy: Evidence From a Birth Cohort. Allergy. 2026 Feb;81(2):552-562. doi: 10.1111/all.70043. Epub 2025 Sep 18. PMID: 40968490; PMCID: PMC12862506.

08/10/2026

I highly recommend following these myth busting posts.

When listening to advice about birth, it’s worth asking: what lens is this person looking through?

Obstetrics is a medical and surgical specialty. Obstetricians are trained to identify and manage complications, including through surgery. Looking for what might go wrong is central to that role, and that can shape how birth is understood, discussed and managed.

We also need to question the assumption that constant surveillance necessarily makes birth safer. Monitoring can lead to interventions that carry risks of their own.

Increased caesareans cannot simply be counted as a consequence for women alone (to support the “at least you have a healthy baby” rhetoric) : they also expose babies to potential short- and longer-term harms. Those consequences belong in an honest discussion of benefits and risks, including outcomes that monitoring trials may never have followed up.

This post highlights why we need to look beyond confident statements and ask what the research actually says.

Women deserve clear information about the benefits, risks, alternatives and uncertainties, and how these apply to their own circumstances. “This is what we routinely do” is not a substitute for that.

22/09/2026

15/09/2026

📣 **Your experience matters**

The Senate Select Committee on Women’s Health is currently inviting submissions from women, families, health professionals and community members across Australia.

The inquiry is examining important women’s health issues including postpartum health, women’s experiences of pain, barriers to affordable and appropriate healthcare, fertility treatment, assisted reproduction and medical device regulation.

Importantly, the postnatal period is specifically within the scope of the inquiry. Experiences involving physical recovery after birth, breastfeeding support, pain, birth trauma, maternal mental health, continuity of care, newborn-feeding advice and access to affordable postpartum services are all relevant.

I have made my own submission. Mine is very detailed because I work with these problems every day and see how gaps in maternity, breastfeeding and postpartum care affect women and their babies.

But your submission does not need to look like mine.

You do not need professional qualifications, research papers or formal language. You do not need to write pages and pages. A few honest lines can be incredibly powerful.

You might simply explain:

• What happened to you
• What care or support was missing
• How it affected you or your family
• What you believe needs to change

Personal stories help the Committee understand the real human consequences behind healthcare policies and statistics. Experiences of birth care, breastfeeding support, postpartum recovery, maternal mental health, pain, infant-feeding advice and barriers to affordable care are all important.

You can ask for your name to be withheld or for your submission to remain confidential if you are concerned about privacy.

Submissions close **Friday 9 October 2026**.

You can make a submission here:
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Womens_Health/WomensHealth

Please consider sharing your experience, even if it is only a few sentences. Your story may help create better care for other women and families. 💗

The new Senate Select Committee on Women’s Health is now accepting submissions. The Select Committee will examine critical women’s health issues including the postpartum period, women’s pain, fertility and the regulation of medical devices. Submissions don’t need to be complex, it can be as simple as sharing your story. You can make a submission by visiting the link below, where you can also find important information about protecting your privacy:
https://aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Womens_health

15/09/2026

Great research to be a part of.

WA women are being called on to provide breast milk samples, which will be used for global research into infant nutrition and to help solve problems including low milk production and mastitis.

"What we're trying to do is find that molecule that tells us that a mother has low supply and then we can measure it just like we do for a blood test for low iron," Professor Donna Geddes, a leading lactation researcher and project lead, told Jo Trilling on 102.5 ABC Perth Afternoons.

"50 per cent of women give up (on breastfeeding) by not having enough milk. So, if I can find something in the milk that we can measure and help mothers understand what's going on, then we have a better chance of extending her lactation," she said.

"We can provide a solution instead of just cheerleading these mothers, patting them on the back, making them express multiple times a day to breastfeed."

The milk will be housed in a new state-of-the-art biobank at UWA in Perth, which is the first of its kind in Australia. The bank has already collected 1,000 samples but can hold more than 100,000.

Breastfeeding women who want to contribute can visit the biobank and express onsite; take their own samples at home, freeze them and drop them off; or those living regionally can request a preservative pack to be delivered.

"We have developed a preservative — like a little freeze-dried powder in the bottom of a tube — we can send you a pack of those. You put the milk in and you pop it in the post and you send it back to us."

Ms Geddes said it was important to collect samples from all different geographical locations across WA.

"We don't know how really hot weather impacts a mother's ability to make milk or if you're out in the Wheatbelt and you're exposed to different chemicals with farming, we don't know how that impacts the mum and her composition," she said.

"We've always been looking at the baby, but we need to look at the mum."


Find more information on the WA Human Milk Biobank website.

20/08/2026

This is such an important and long-overdue step. Thank you, Senator Marielle Smith, for sharing your own experience and for successfully establishing this inquiry.

Although this Senate Select Committee will examine women’s health much more broadly, including fertility and women’s pain, it’s particularly exciting to see Senator Smith placing postpartum care firmly in the spotlight.

Far too many women fall through enormous gaps after giving birth.

I am particularly hopeful this inquiry will lead to properly funded, accessible and evidence-based breastfeeding and infant sleep support. Families deserve care grounded in normal infant biology, not advice that leaves women feeling their bodies have failed or that their perfectly normal babies need fixing.

Good postpartum care should help parents feel informed, supported and able to trust their instincts. It should never be an optional extra.

If you have a lived or professional perspective that the committee needs to hear, please follow along. I will share more information about how to make a submission as soon as it becomes available.

17/08/2026

What if rising birth interventions and caesarean rates aren’t mainly because women are older or asking for more caesareans?

A new Australian study looked at more than 1.3 million births in NSW between 2004 and 2018, then focused closely on low-risk first-time mothers who entered labour without an obvious clinical indication or preference for intervention.

The researchers found something important.

The growing use of a cascade of interventions (labour induction/augmentation → epidural → instrumental birth or unplanned caesarean) was not well explained by changes in women’s characteristics over this time frame, or by women increasingly choosing more interventionist hospitals.

Instead, much of the increase was explained by hospital practice style.

In other words, the culture and clinical norms of the hospital mattered.

And the induction data are particularly striking.

Among these low-risk first-time mothers:

• Induction increased from 28% to 46%
• Induction at 37–38 weeks increased from 20.7% to 49.2%
• “Prolonged pregnancy”, defined in the paper as 41–42 weeks, became less common as a reason for induction
• Induction without a recorded medical reason increased substantially

And when the researchers compared hospitals, they found considerable variation in intervention rates even after accounting for differences between the women giving birth.

This challenges the very common explanation that intervention rates are rising mainly because women are older, higher risk or simply asking for more caesareans.

For this group of women, that explanation just doesn’t stack up.

The bigger message for me is this:

Where a woman gives birth, and the culture of care she encounters there, can profoundly influence what happens to her even when her underlying level of risk is essentially the same.

Same risk.
Different hospital.
Potentially very different birth.

Knowing the culture of the hospital you are birthing in matters.

📖 Fiebig, D. G., Homer, C., Scarf, V., Viney, R., & Yu, S. (2026). Why Are Cascade Birth Interventions Rising? Health Economics and Policy, 1(1), 2. https://doi.org/10.3390/hep1010002

07/08/2026

🌍 World Breastfeeding Week 2026

Day 7 of 7

Kinda chic to…

…feed your baby to sleep.

…understand normal infant sleep before blaming low milk supply.

…trust soft breasts to keep making milk.

…remember the dummy is an artificial breast, not the other way around.

…watch your baby, not the clock.

…remember that finishing a bottle does not prove your baby needed all of it.

For the past six days, we have looked at some of the most common pieces of advice that can undermine breastfeeding confidence.

Advice that tells parents to delay feeds, limit feeds, replace the breast, distrust their bodies or interpret normal baby behaviour as evidence that something has gone wrong.

But babies are not machines, and breastfeeding is not a measurable transaction that must follow a timetable.

Breastfeeding is nutrition, but it is also comfort, regulation, communication, connection and sleep support.

Babies wake frequently. They sometimes want to feed again soon. They suck for reasons other than hunger. Breasts continue making milk even when they feel soft. A baby swallowing milk that is flowing does not automatically mean the breastfeed was not enough.

My final slide says:

Kinda chic to trust your baby more than social media.

Social media can be a wonderful place to find information and support, but it cannot see, assess or know your individual baby.

It cannot know your breast milk storage capacity or your baby's temperament, feeding pattern, or need for closeness. And it certainly cannot reduce every baby to the same feeding schedule, wake window or set of rules.

Your baby is not a trend.

Generic advice should never drown out the baby in front of you or make you feel that normal breastfeeding and infant behaviour need to be fixed.

Perhaps the most useful question is not:

“How do I stop my baby doing this?”

Perhaps it is:

“Why is my baby doing this?”

Because when we understand normal breastfeeding and normal infant behaviour, particularly sleep, so much of what parents are told to do no longer makes sense.

🤱 Sometimes the best way to support breastfeeding isn’t to change the baby. It’s to understand the baby.

07/08/2026

🌍 World Breastfeeding Week 2026
7 Things You've Probably Heard About Breastfeeding
Day 6 (sorry it's a day late)

"If your baby drinks a bottle after breastfeeding, they must still be hungry."

It can feel like convincing proof that the breastfeed wasn't enough.

But an empty bottle only tells us that your baby swallowed the milk that was offered. It doesn't tell us whether they needed the entire amount.

Babies suck for many reasons, not just hunger. Sucking is comforting, regulating and deeply instinctive. Once milk is flowing into a baby's mouth, swallowing also becomes part of keeping their airway safe.

When milk reaches the back of the mouth, babies automatically swallow to move it safely away from the airway. This is an important protective reflex. It means that continuing to suck and swallow isn't always the same as needing more milk.

This doesn't mean babies never need additional milk. Sometimes they absolutely do.

However, if your baby does need a "top-up", it is usually best to top them up at the breast first, rather than reaching straight for a bottle. Offering the breast again gives your baby another opportunity to transfer milk while providing your breasts with the stimulation that helps maintain your milk supply.

If additional milk is still needed after that, offering it by paced bottle feeding allows your baby more time to recognise and respond to their own feelings of fullness, rather than simply continuing to drink because milk keeps flowing.

Whether a baby needs extra milk should always be based on the whole picture, including:

🤍 effective milk transfer
🤍 wet and dirty nappies
🤍 growth over time
🤍 your baby's overall health and wellbeing
..not simply whether they will finish a bottle.

Using a bottle as a test of milk supply can unintentionally undermine breastfeeding confidence. When top-ups replace time and milk removal at the breast without protecting breast stimulation, they can gradually contribute to the very supply concerns everyone was trying to avoid.

A baby swallowing milk that is flowing from a bottle is not proof that they needed it.

🤱 Sometimes the best way to support breastfeeding isn't to change the baby. It's to understand the baby.

05/08/2026