wearable breast pump

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I never thought I’d be excited to try out a wearable breast pump.

My son was born last year, and when I came back to work after 12 weeks of leave, I had to figure out how to write on very little sleep, how to meet all my deadlines in my newly limited time — and how to pump. Like a growing number of American women, I breastfed my baby, and I wanted to continue feeding him breast milk even when I was away from him during weekdays. That meant that I had to use a machine to remove milk from my breasts every three hours wearable breast pump

The process turned out to be difficult, stressful, and time-consuming, costing me precious work hours and isolating me from my coworkers. And I had it easier than most new mothers: I had paid leave in the first place, and an employer that made an effort to be accommodating to pumping mothers.

For the uninitiated, here’s what the pumping process looks like: Assemble five plastic parts into an apparatus that looks a little bit like a trumpet. Take off your shirt and bra and put on a special hands-free pumping bra (not included with the purchase of the pump — you have to buy one or ). Fit one end of the trumpet inside the bra and over your breast, and connect the other end to a tube that leads to the pump. Do the same for the other breast. Turn on the pump and leave it on for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. Then disconnect, get dressed, put the milk in the fridge, and get back to work.

Did I mention that the  recommends that you wash each part after every pump session and sanitize all of them in boiling water once a day? Or that many people have to pump three (or more) times during the workday, both to make enough milk for a baby and to maintain milk supply? Or that if you miss a session, you can end up with painful clogged milk ducts or an infection called mastitis that can require antibiotics?

As Jessica Shortall, author of the pumping advice book , told me, “the whole thing is painful, ugly, loud, precarious in terms of its operability and dependability, and very exposing.”

Which is why I found myself fitting a Willow pump to my breast one morning last fall. The , a hands-free, tube-free pump, is one of several recent innovations that promise to make the pumping experience better for mothers. Others include the , billed as “the world’s first silent wearable breast pump,” and accessories like the  that aim to fix various problems with pumping.

Pumping is terrible. Here’s why.

Here are some of the complaints Shortall has heard from women: wearable breast pump are noisy, easily heard on a conference call or through a thin office door. The flanges — a term for the cone-shaped pump part that goes over the breast — can leak, leading to embarrassing stains on work clothes. Even without leaks, the process looks bizarre; one friend of Shortall’s told her his wife’s nipples in the pump looked like “thumbs in a garden hose.”

Pumping isn’t supposed to be painful, but it can be, especially if your flanges don’t fit properly. I took a portable pump on a work trip recently, and as a TSA agent swabbed it down for drug residue, I heard another agent mutter to her male colleague, “That shit hurts.”

It’s also a time suck. In total, I spent about 90 minutes a day pumping, and though I could type on my laptop during some of that time thanks to the hands-free bra I purchased, I was still losing hours every week assembling, disassembling, and cleaning tiny parts — hours I could have spent working, playing with my baby, talking to my husband, or catching up on much-needed sleep.

Given the loss of work time, it’s no surprise that pumping may harm women’s earning power — a 2012 study found that mothers who breastfed their babies for at least six months suffered a greater drop in earnings after having children than moms who didn’t breastfeed, as . And even if you, like me, can type while you pump, you’re still alone in a lactation room, missing out on potential networking opportunities and the intangible benefits of actually seeing your colleagues.

As , breastfeeding is often touted as an inexpensive way to feed your baby, “but that’s only true if you assume your time has no value.” When I was pumping, it sometimes seemed to me that breast pumps had been designed by people who assumed mothers’ time had no value.

I felt grateful to be able to make milk for my baby and still keep my job, especially when so many women have to choose between the two. A space for pumping like the one I used at work is required under the Affordable Care Act for many employers, but  have access to one, . I also have a fair amount of control over my schedule and, unless I was traveling for a story, could relatively easily block off time to pump — which is not the case for many police officers, teachers, nurses, or others whose careers involve a lot of face time.

However, nothing in American society — not parental leave policies, medical care, research funding, work culture, or product design — is set up to help parents feed their children breast milk. Changing that will require reimagining not just the pump itself, but the entire culture around work and family.