User:Male breastfeeding

Women and men have exactly the same physical apparatus for making milk, it's just that the mother's milk glands might be slightly larger. The amount of milk they produce has to do with how much the baby sucks at the breast, not with breast size. This goes for the man as well.

When a baby suckles at the breast, hormones are produced which cause milk production to increase. The more the baby sucks, the more milk is made. Your body responds to what the baby needs. If the baby steps up the amount of time it is spending at the breast, the body figures the baby is growing and needs more milk, so it makes more. As simple as that. All a man has to do to get his breasts to produce milk is to let the baby suck at them.

Pregnancy is not a pre-requisite for making milk. Many women who adopt babies have a desire to breastfeed them and are successful in creating milk by this simple method of letting the baby suck. If a woman who has not been pregnant can get her breasts to make milk, so can a man.

The primary reason that men have desired this is because of expediency. In ancient times, before there was formula, a woman breastfed her baby, or if the woman died, a wet nurse was found to suckle the child until it was grown. But what if a man and his wife were on a journey and the wife died, out in the middle of no where - how would the child survive? There have been recorded historical accounts of the man simply picking up where the wife left off, and with great success.

Why do people feel this is so unusual? It has been done since ancient times. Even the Bible speaks of it:

Numbers 11:12 "Have I conceived all this people? have I begotten them, that thou shouldest say unto me, Carry them in thy bosom, as a nursing father beareth the sucking child, unto the land which thou swarest unto their fathers?" Obviously, a nursing father is a sight that must have been at least occasionally seen during those times or else there would have been no point to the metaphor Moses was trying to construct.

Isaiah 49:23 "And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers: they shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet; and thou shalt know that I am the LORD: for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me."