Disability and Breastfeeding: What is Sustainable Support?

By Naomi Bromberg Bar-Yam, PhD

July is Disability Awareness Month, also known as Disability Pride Month, commemorating the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in July 1990. It’s a time to recognize the rights, experiences, and leadership of disabled people in all areas of life, including parenting, and parenting support professionals. It’s also an opportunity to reflect on the ways our systems include—or exclude—disabled families. As we look ahead to World Breastfeeding Week in August, with its 2025 theme “Prioritize Breastfeeding: Create Sustainable Support Systems,” we must ask: What does it take to make those systems truly inclusive?

Disabled parents breastfeed. Disabled babies breastfeed. And both deserve full access to the knowledge, tools, environments, and respect that make breastfeeding possible and sustainable.

Disability is not rare. In the United States, more than one in four adults live with a disability, some from birth, some acquired later. Disability takes many forms—some visible, others not. It can be physical, sensory, intellectual, developmental, cognitive, related to mental health, or connected to chronic illness. Some disabilities may directly affect lactation—positioning, or milk supply. Others do not, but still require that support systems be responsive, accessible, and informed. Yet too often, public health messaging and lactation care systems treat disability as an outlier—or overlook it entirely.

Supporting disabled parents and children begins with recognizing this diversity. No two families are the same, and the support they receive shouldn’t be either.

Building Accessible and Inclusive Systems for Disabled Families

Many challenges disabled families face in breastfeeding are not inevitable—they are the result of systems that weren’t built with them in mind. But systems can change. A sustainable breastfeeding support system is one that actively includes and uplifts disabled parents and children. That requires:

• Clinicians with training and confidence in disability-inclusive care: Lactation professionals must be equipped to support a wide range of physical, cognitive, and communication needs. Learning how to adapt care can help families meet their own feeding goals.
• Accessible information and communication: Breastfeeding education and support materials must be available in a range of formats—plain language, Braille, large print, captioned and interpreted videos, visual supports, and more—so that all parents can access the information they need. But accessibility isn’t just for families. Practitioners and supporters also need access to clear, trustworthy, and disability-specific resources. No one can know everything about every disability, but all providers should know where to go for guidance, how to ask respectful questions, and how to adapt support in collaboration with each family.
• Physically accessible care environments: Hospitals, clinics, and lactation rooms should be designed to accommodate people with mobility impairments, as well as supportive seating, adaptive tools, and alternative positioning options. Breastfeeding and parenting groups should welcome disabled parents by ensuring physical access and affirming all kinds of bodies and families.

By building systems that reflect the full diversity of parents and babies, we make breastfeeding more accessible, successful, and sustainable—not just for disabled families, but for everyone.

Disability Justice Is Breastfeeding Justice

Disability justice strengthens breastfeeding advocacy. When we include disabled people in our vision of breastfeeding support, we build systems that are more resilient and more attuned to the diverse realities of parenting.

This includes disabled lactation professionals and peer supporters, whose lived experiences bring vital perspectives to their work. While it’s not always possible—or necessary—to match a client’s identity or disability with that of their provider, the inclusion of disabled professionals broadens the field’s collective knowledge and strengthens care for all families. When disabled providers are welcomed and supported, they help build care spaces that are more responsive, collaborative, and affirming.

As one disabled lactation supporter put it:

“My lived experience gives me the ability to collaborate with parents in creating a space where they feel invited to show up fully—without the extra weight of masking or suppressing various parts of their experiences and identities.”

As we move from Disability Awareness Month into World Breastfeeding Week, let us carry this awareness forward. Sustainable breastfeeding support systems must include disabled parents, children, and professionals—not only as recipients of care, but as leaders and changemakers.

Resources:

There is a growing number of resources for both parents and professionals regarding parenting, breastfeeding, and disability. As with any resources, read critically: much of the information is helpful and enlightening; you (and we) may not agree with all of the content.

• This piece promotes agency around breastfeeding for disabled parents: What Every Disabled Mother Should Know About Breastfeeding
• A webcast from the Ohio Lactation Consultants Association: Breastfeeding Advice for Mothers with Disabilities
• Simple suggestions for disabled parents who are breastfeeding: Disabled Nursing: A Breastfeeding Mom’s Solutions
• From the Breastfeeding Network in the UK: Breastfeeding with a Disability
• From the Lactation Network, on disabled babies: Breastfeeding a Baby with Special Needs
• This year, Sept. 16-22, 2025, will be the first ever Deaf and Hard of Hearing Breastfeeding Week, organized by the DC Breastfeeding Coalition and the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Breastfeeding Collective.
• The Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University’s Heller School: August 6 webinar on Lactation and Breastfeeding with a Disability

Special thanks to Lillian Roberts, SLPA, CBD, CPD, CBS, for her review of this blog, helpful discussion, and suggestions for resources.

Naomi Bromberg Bar-Yam, PhD, has been working in maternal and child health for 35 years as an educator, researcher, advocate, and writer.  In addition to serving on the board of Massachusetts Breastfeeding Coalition, she is past president of the Human Milk Banking Association of North America (HMBANA) and is the founding director emerita of Mothers’ Milk Bank Northeast, which provides safe donor milk to hospitals and families throughout the northeastern US. Learn more about her on her LactSpeak profile.

Blog editor: Ann Marie Lindquist

Image (inspired by the Disability Pride Flag) by Lily from Pixabay