What About Cheap Breast Pumps by Evenflo, The First Years and Gerber?
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See also Breast Pump Adverse Events Reported to the FDA.
Walk into any Wal-Mart, Target or Babies ‘R Us and you will see these breast pumps. Seeing them everywhere lends certain credence. These stores must be selling a large number of them. Why would anyone spend $200 or more on a Medela, Avent, or Ameda breast pump, when you can buy one of these cheap breast pumps?
What actual users have said about cheap breast pumps:
- Are painful and causes nipple injury
- Could not express any milk with it
- Milk not going into the bottles but everywhere else
- Need to stop and start pumping to fix some problem all the time
- Noisy
- Pump motor died after short term use
- Don’t waste your money!
More seriously than wasting one’s money and time, cheap breast pumps have done physical and emotional harm to women. Sometimes these breast pumps contribute to women giving up on breast feeding. It is hard to continue breast feeding when you are waiting for nipple injuries to heal. It is difficult, though not impossible, to re-lactate. Just as serious as a torn nipple is the way an ineffective breast pump can destroy a woman’s confidence in her body’s ability to produce milk. A woman may think, “Can’t get any milk out; I must not have any breast milk; my baby needs formula.” She may falsely conclude that it is her fault she cannot express any milk. “Can’t get any milk out; I cannot pump. I’ve got to give my baby formula in my absence.” This will start a mother on the slippery slope of less nursing, less pumping, supplementing with formula, and before you know it, the baby is weaned.
One user’s review of a cheap breast pump:
"I am very disappointed with my experiences with this pump. It destroyed my confidence in my body and caused me to give up expressing milk. I'm still not sure why I wasn't able to express milk with this pump. After a couple of months I supplemented with formula instead. It wasn't until the birth of my second child that I attempted to use the pump again with the same disappointing results. I put it away and bought an Avent instead and am now able to express milk with no problems."*
Excerpt from a letter to a cheap breast pump company:
"This pump is very painful, and I can't stress this fact enough. I even called your company to see if maybe something was wrong with the pump. Nothing was. There is no happy medium on this pump. It has two settings no matter where you move the suction dial. On the lower settings it doesn't stimulate milk and on the higher settings you can pump milk but it is so painful that you can not leave it on longer than 20 - 60 seconds. After repeated use of this pump (about 4 days, 6 times a day) my nipples were so bloody that my child's milk was orange (milk and blood mixed) and I stopped breast-feeding and pumping altogether and switched to formula. It was so painful for the next two and a half weeks that I went nowhere because I could not stand to have clothing or even breast pads touch my nipples."**
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*http://www.epinions.com/content_103386812036
**http://www1.epinions.com/content_14019104388
