Is it ok to drink alcohol when breastfeeding?

This is such a common question and you can read lots of conflicting advice on the subject from:

“If you are sober enough to hold the baby you are sober enough to breastfeed”

to

“Wait 2hrs per drink till you feed the baby”.

So What does the evidence tell us?

How much alcohol really gets in breast milk?

“Alcohol passes freely into breastmilk reaching approximately maternal levels BUT maternal blood levels have to reach 300mg/100ml before mild sedation is reached in the baby (this compares with a level of 80mg/100ml needed to fail the police breath test in England, Wales and N. Ireland; 50mg/100ml Scotland”*.

After drinking alcohol, how long should I wait to breastfeed?

One option is to breastfeed the baby at exactly the time when you are actually drinking, because the alcohol won’t have reached your milk then.

The alcohol level in your milk peaks about 1 hour after you drink and should be out of your system at 2-3 hours which is where the “Wait 2hrs per drink till you feed the baby” advice comes from. This would indeed be the way to minimise alcohol your baby is exposed to, but it can be very challenging to make a baby wait for a feed!

Do I need to pump and dump after drinking?

Pumping & dumping (pumping breastmilk out and throwing it away in the hope of clearing alcohol out of the mother’s system) does not work in this situation. Alcohol levels match maternal blood level, as the mother’s system clears of alcohol, so does the breastmilk.

Other considerations:

Co-sleeping after drinking alcohol can be very dangerous** so please work hard to avoid doing that.

If you know you have an occasion coming up where you plan to have several drinks, plan in advance a trusted babysitter.

You might also like to build up a stash of pumped milk in advance for your baby to drink until the alcohol passes through your system.

If you have any questions regarding anything mentioned in this post, please feel free to get in touch.

Sally

*Evidence based resource from BfN Drugs in breastmilk information service linked here

**1 in 174 chance of death (BASIS.org)