The Jefferson County Health Department’s Women, Infants and Children Program joined forces with other local partners to celebrate breastfeeding. Cuenta Conmigo Coop, Mothers’ Milk Bank and the Jefferson County Library helped organize a special event of their regular Mothers’ Milk Bank Baby Café.
The Baby Café is held every Monday at the Belmar Library for breastfeeding, nursing and pregnant families. In honor of World Breastfeeding Week, the agencies wanted to provide more information to mothers and families in the Jeffco community.
Perla Madrid, a registered dietitian and lactation counselor with the Jeffco WIC program, said the special session still serves as a support group for women.
“We’re here to support women with breastfeeding – and not just with latching on if they’re having that issue,” Madrid said. “But it’s also just a resource for them to talk to other moms, spend time, be around other people and get that support.”
Paulina Erices, lactation consultant and director of development and strategic partnerships at Cuenta Conmigo Coop, explained that World Breastfeeding Week is especially important for women of color.
“We want to make sure that people get the information they need – that they know that their right to breastfeed their babies is protected,” Erices said. “That they are educated and able to make different choices about how to feed their babies.”
Erices added that this is especially true for women from marginalized communities who already face enough additional barriers.
“When it comes to breastfeeding and lactation, we should have people in the community, in hospitals and other settings who know how to support,” Erices said.
According to Jacqueline Morales, a lactation consultant for the Jefferson County WIC program, bilingual services are essential to helping Latino mothers with language barriers. Morales said her job is to provide very close support to breastfeeding mothers.
“I’m a lactation consultant,” Morales said. “So I counsel them throughout the trimesters of pregnancy. We really become friends. We talk about what’s happening at home and then about their environment. It gets really personal. And then we contact each other as often as they want. They call me, we text each other, or I meet them at the clinic.”
Rachel Goodman, clinical director at Mothers’ Milk Bank, said there is another important aspect to consider when it comes to breastfeeding.
“From a human milk bank perspective, milk banking is a really critical part of breastfeeding and a bridge to breastfeeding,” Goodman said. “If you have a premature baby in the hospital and your milk isn’t coming in for a week, what are you going to feed the baby? It should be human milk, and donor milk helps support breastfeeding, and we do that in other ways, too.”
Goodman said this support is the reason for her partnership with Jeffco Baby Café and for the milk bank to operate its own Baby Café.
“On Fridays, the milk bank also hosts a baby cafe to support families struggling with breastfeeding. It provides socializing and other opportunities for families to connect with each other and receive breastfeeding advice,” Goodman said.
Madrid said that education and awareness about breastfeeding are needed to overcome the still prevailing notion that breastfeeding is effortless.
“Learning to breastfeed is also very useful because I think breastfeeding is presented in a very natural way, as if it’s instinctive or easy – you should already know how to do it,” Madrid said. “But it’s not. There’s a learning curve for both mother and baby, and that’s the connection these programs have.”
For more information about the Jefferson County WIC program and other breastfeeding resources, visit the Breastfeeding page of the Jefferson County Health Department website.