How to wean while pregnant: when you're touched out, depleted and quietly grieving

You found out you're pregnant (congratulations!) and somewhere in amongst the shock and the joy and the arithmetic of how old they'll both be, a quieter thought arrived and wouldn't leave.

"I think I need to stop breastfeeding."

If you're nursing a child over one and you've just seen two lines, this is written for you. Not to talk you into anything and certainly not to talk you out of it, but because the way this particular ending is handled will sit with you for a long time afterwards, and it deserves more than the advice you'll get from a search engine at 2:00am.

I've supported thousands of mothers through this transition - many of them pregnant - and I've been on the other side of it myself, having fed my first son for three years and nine months before we stopped. So let me tell you what I know.

You do not need a good enough reason

Let's deal with this first, because it's the thing standing between most women and any kind of peace.

You might want to wean because your nipples feel like they're being sandpapered every time your toddler latches. You might want to wean because you're so touched out by the end of the day that your partner putting a hand on your shoulder makes you wince. You might want to wean because you're exhausted in a way you can't explain, or because you're carrying a high-risk pregnancy, or because you need a medication or a treatment that means stopping is simply the right call.

Or you might want to wean simply because you want to. Because you have carried another person's comfort in your body for nineteen months and you would like, just for a while, to have a body that belongs only to you and the baby growing in it.

Every single one of those is a reason. None of them requires a permission slip.

What's actually happening in your body

Some of what you're feeling isn't in your head, it's in your bloodstream and knowing that helps. Rising progesterone and oestrogen shift your breasts back towards making colostrum, which means your supply usually drops sharply somewhere in the first half of pregnancy, regardless of how often your little one feeds. The milk that's left changes too, with lactose and fat falling away and protein rising, so by the second half of pregnancy your toddler is essentially nursing on a thin, salty early colostrum that many children go off entirely by themselves [1].

Your nipples become extraordinarily sensitive and for a significant number of women this tips into something fiercer. Breastfeeding aversion, that full-body urge to unlatch, that flash of rage or skin-crawling agitation that arrives the moment your child attaches, is real and it's documented. In one descriptive study, almost a third of the women who experienced it reported it beginning while they were pregnant and feeding a toddler [2].

You're not a monster. Your body is running gestation and lactation at once, which is the most metabolically expensive thing it will ever do - and the aversion is very likely part of how it tells you so.

On safety, since somebody will ask you: the evidence doesn't support the idea that breastfeeding causes miscarriage or preterm birth in a healthy, low-risk pregnancy [3,4]. Caution genuinely does apply where there's a history of preterm labour or where a pregnancy is otherwise high-risk anf your midwife or obstetrician is the right person for that conversation. But if you're stopping, stop because you want to, not because somebody has frightened you into it without justification.

The decision has to be made in your heart before it's made in your kitchen

This is the part almost nobody tells you and it's the reason most gentle weaning attempts fall apart in week two. A child who is over one is not a passive participant. They read you. They know, with an accuracy that is frankly unsettling, when you are saying no while meaning maybe. And if some part of you hasn't finished deciding, they will feel the gap in you and they will push against it, because that gap is where hope lives.

So the mothers who find this hardest are almost always the ones who began before they were settled. They start removing feeds while still privately negotiating with themselves and then when the crying comes - as it will - they interpret it as proof they've made a mistake. They cave (like I did). Then their child learns that enough distress reopens the door and the next attempt is harder than the first.

The work of actually reconciling this in yourself, of reaching the point where you can hold your child through their sadness without your own resolve wobbling, is not a soft add-on to weaning. It is the foundation the whole thing stands on, and it is the single biggest predictor of whether this goes gently or grimly.

That's the inner work and it takes more than a blog post. But it can be done,and it can be done quickly once you know what you're actually looking for.

Then you have to tell them

Here's the second thing that separates a weaning that works from one that doesn't.

Over the age of one, your child understands vastly more language than they can produce. They can follow a plan. They can hold an idea across days and they can absolutely tell the difference between something being taken from them and something being explained to them first. Most mothers do it the wrong way round. They remove the feed and then explain afterwards, usually in the middle of a meltdown, usually while the child is far too dysregulated to take in a word of it. It goes badly and they conclude that their child isn't ready.

The conversation just needs to happen first, in daylight, when nobody is upset, days - or weeks - before anything actually changes.

What you say matters enormously. The words, the timing, the order you introduce them in, what you do when they ask anyway, and what you say on the fourth night when they're crying for it and you're pregnant and sobbing yourself. That's the bit that needs a script, and it's the bit I'll not pretend can be improvised.

What I couldn't fit in here

If you've read this far you already know the two things that matter most. Settle it in yourself first. Tell them before you change anything.

What I haven't given you is the method itself. The actual sequence, what goes in place of the feeds you're removing, which feeds to drop first and why, how to do it in a body that's pregnant and depleted and hasn't got infinite patience left and precisely what to say and when.

That's because it took me nine years of counselling breastfeeding mothers and nearly four years of nursing my own child to build it and it lives in one place.

Weaning With Love

The full course is everything I know about stopping breastfeeding without losing the bond you've built.

Nine short video modules. The complete guide. The words to say to your child, from one year old to four and beyond. How to night wean without leaving anyone to cry. The bonus masterclass answering every question I've been asked about stopping in the last five years. Exclusive group support and lifetime access, so you can come back to it with this child and the next one.

You're not choosing between loving your child and honouring yourself. You never were.

I'm ready to Wean with Love: https://www.thebreastfeedingmentor.com/general-clean

Danielle

❤️

References

1. López-Fernández G, Barrios M, Goberna-Tricas J, Gómez-Benito J. Breastfeeding during pregnancy: a systematic review. Women Birth. 2017;30(6):e292–300.

2. Morns MA, Steel AE, McIntyre E, Burns E. Breastfeeding aversion response (BAR): a descriptive study. J Midwifery Womens Health. 2023;68(4):456–65.

3. Molitoris J. Breast-feeding during pregnancy and the risk of miscarriage. Perspect Sex Reprod Health. 2019;51(3):153–63.

4. Bounou L, Katsaras GN, Mitsiakos G. Breastfeeding during pregnancy: a systematic review of the literature. Maedica (Bucur). 2023;18(3):463–9.