Why Mothers Were Not Allowed to Take a Breast Pump Home for Sixty Years
By the early 1920s, Edward Lasker had built a mechanical breast pump that worked. It was in hospitals. It was in medical textbooks. Prominent pediatricians were calling it indispensable.
And for the next sixty years, it almost exclusively stayed exactly where it was: inside the hospital, operated by medical staff, classified as a clinical device rather than something a mother would use at home.
The hospital machine
Large, cumbersome, and often terrifying-looking electric pumps began to appear in hospital wards in the early twentieth century. These were not intended for personal use but were rather stationary units designed to serve multiple mothers, primarily those whose infants were premature, ill, or separated from them.
These early electric pumps were powerful, often painfully so, and operated on a one-size-fits-all principle that ignored comfort. Made from glass and hard rubber, they were difficult to clean and sterilize properly between uses, raising concerns about the spread of infection. Furthermore, their use was almost exclusively mediated by medical professionals, reinforcing the idea that milk expression was a clinical procedure rather than a natural aspect of motherhood.
Why doctors resisted sending pumps home
Engineering problems that resulted in the contamination of extracted milk, coupled with the era's ongoing faith in scientific infant feeding, restricted the use of these devices to medical purposes only: cases of engorged, inflamed, or infected breasts, or feeding premature babies. Physicians seemed to balk at sending these electrical milking machines home with mothers.
The official reasons were hygiene and the risk of contamination. The harder-to-articulate reason was that the medical establishment of the 1920s through to the 1960s had increasingly positioned infant feeding as a scientific matter requiring professional oversight. Formula was presented as modern, measurable, and controllable. Breastfeeding, and by extension pumping, was messier, harder to standardize, and harder to supervise.
The formula parallel
While physicians resisted sending pumps home, formula companies were doing the opposite. They were marketing directly to hospitals, training medical staff on their products, and sending free samples home with new mothers at discharge.
A device that supported breastfeeding stayed locked in the clinical setting, while a product that replaced it was being actively distributed through those same institutions.
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Sixty years
Electric breast pumps were used in hospitals as early as the 1920s to 1940s, but they did not become common for personal home use until the late 1980s and 1990s. This shift was driven by increasing numbers of mothers returning to the workforce and a growing cultural acceptance of breastfeeding.
That gap, roughly sixty years, represents an enormous missed opportunity for mothers who wanted to breastfeed but needed to be away from their babies, mothers who needed to establish or maintain supply, and mothers whose infants were too weak to nurse directly but who had no access to the technology that could have helped them outside a hospital setting.
The pump that could have helped them existed.
It was simply not considered theirs to use.
What changed
The shift in the 1980s and 1990s did not come from a change of heart within the medical establishment. It came from mothers returning to work in larger numbers, creating a practical demand that the market eventually responded to. Medela launched its first portable personal pump in the late 1980s. By the 1990s, the pump had finally begun its journey out of the hospital ward and into everyday life.
Sources: Museum of Healthcare, Breast Pump from the Collection, Wikipedia, Breast Pump, Digital Childhoods, History of Infant Feeding.
The pump came home in the 1980s. Now it's coming everywhere with you.
Pump-a-Porter is a belt bag that holds your pump motor at your waist while you walk, work, parent, or take out the recycling. Built for the mothers the medical establishment took sixty years to design for.
Shop Pump-a-PorterThe Swedish engineer and the wartime standard
Next week: the Swedish engineer who built a different kind of pump during World War Two, and whose research set the standard that every breast pump in the world is still measured against today.
