Among supporters and opposites, the fact stands for itself, men can actually produce milk through their breasts. I couldn’t believe it myself also when I overheard some people talking about it. First thought it was a joke, and started asking if this is possible.
Thousands of online reviews says that this is over-weird, and only few have been through the subject in a rational way offering documented evidences and historical proves that kills the denial case of men that hits them when they hear this.
In 1978, “The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding” a book by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael, claimed that men can have produced milk after stimulating their nipples. Upon reading this book, one couple of its readers decided to examine the power of the mind of the male convincing himself that he can breastfeed their unassisted homebirth, and within a week one of his breasts swelled up and milk began dripping out. But since the mother was doing really fine, so there was so need for the father to actually breastfeed the baby, so he suggested to himself that the lactation would stop and within a week his breast returned to normal.
Again, why aren’t we really thinking this is possible when even the media didn’t ignore it, in late 2004, the Internet Movie Database reported that Dustin Hoffman suddenly had the urge to breastfeed. He was just really keen to help out with his first grandchild. Interestingly, he could have possibly lent a help if he had held the sucking newborn to his nipples for a couple weeks.
There have been countless literary descriptions of men miraculously breastfeeding, from the Talmud to Tolstoy, where in Anna Karenina there is a short anecdote of a baby suckling an Englishman for sustenance while onboard a ship.
The Scientific American 1997, came across the year 1896 compendium Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, George and Walter Pyle catalogue several instances of male nursing being observed. Among them was a south American man, observed in Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who subbed as wet nurse after his wife fell ill as well as male missionaries in Brazil that were the sole milk supply for their children because their wives has shriveled breasts. More recently, Agence France-Press reported a short piece in 2002 on a 38-year-old man is Sri Lanka who nursed his two daughters through their infancy after his wife died during the birth of her second child.
The safety says that women are better suited to breastfeeding than men are. As if a mother is completely out of the picture, however, as in the case of adoption, or a mother goes back to work and a baby is left in the care of his/her father, for some families breastfeeding might be an acceptable alternative to formula bottles and pacifiers.
So scientifically, males of many different mammalian species have the potential to lactate, male milk production could actually be our advantage, especially with all the career women trying to balance the demands of job and family. Why else would men still have nipples?
Written by: Mahmoud Allam
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