“The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men—from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
In A Nutshell
Breastfeeding is the quintessential image of motherhood: a symbol of everything that’s unique and special about a child’s bond with its mother. Except breastfeeding isn’t the exclusive preserve of women. In the right circumstances, men are capable of producing milk and nursing their children.
The Whole Bushel
If you’re male, do you ever stop and wonder why you have nipples? No, seriously: There’s literally no reason for them to be there. You don’t produce milk, you don’t lactate or breastfeed your young . . . or do you? According to science, it’s not only theoretically possible for a man to breastfeed but something that has been done several times in practice.
See, our hormones are capable of doing some pretty weird things. And prolactin—the hormone responsible for milk production—doesn’t exist exclusively in women. Get enough of it flowing round your (male) body and you too will start to lactate. The strange part is what it takes to get there—usually an unusual spike in that same hormone. When milk shows up on its own like that, doctors call it galactorrhea. Scientific American lists at least four possible causes: a pituitary gland tumor, long-term disruption to the liver (possibly via starvation), the taking of certain medications, and even nipple stimulation. And starvation has really done it—doctors recorded men who began lactating after they were freed from Nazi concentration camps and Japanese POW camps in World War II, once regular meals started rebuilding their starved bodies.
Yes, nipple stimulation. Play with your nipples for long enough and that stimulation can release prolactin—with enough building up, a man’s nipples can start producing milk. Doctors who have looked into it treat it as a long shot, and plenty of men could keep at it for ages with nothing to show. But it has happened. In 2002, a Sri Lankan man was reported to have done exactly that after his wife died giving birth to their second child. Other cases abound in the annals of medical literature. For all we men tend to think of breastfeeding as the mother’s job, the truth is that, given the right push, our bodies can do it too.
