one of my biggest fears about intrapartum antibiotic use is that all those good bacteria are supposed to be transferred to the baby during passage through the birth canal. c-section birth, or vaginal with antibiotics reduce the transfer, and then lack of breastfeeding exacerbates the bacterial imbalance even further.

there’s a lot we don’t know about how your bacterial colonization primes your immune system for _life_ and even if doing the antibiotics reduces GBS infections at birth, we may be trading that for increased rates of allergic conditions later in life, some of which can be life-threatening themselves – anaphylaxis, asthma, etc.

i was GBS+ for my first birth, and received a single dose of antibiotics 3 hours before the birth – he was fast! with my second i declined to test or treat. i took a course of probiotics in the last month of pregnancy, attended quickly to yeast infections throughout pregnancy (symptom of vaginal flora out of balance), and went through pregnancy and the entire birth without vaginal exams or other internal procedures.

Any breastfeeding professionals out there have other thoughts?