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Originally Posted by ~Purity♥Lake~  Well, I don't buy those statistics. I don't care how many women they tested, 200 is just not that many, though. I coslept, breastfed 24/7, around the clock, on demand, no pacifier, just me and her, wore her in a sling, and my period still returned exactly 8 weeks postpartum. That was when I went on minipill. It was two months later before my husband and I had sex, twice, (with condoms) within a week, and that was all it took. I also remember Abigail waking and needing to nurse immediately after the sex. She pretty much nursed every hour, or more often, every day, every night, for 6 straight months. I was a perma-milk-machine for that half a year. By 6 months, she would actually sometimes sleep for two hours straight and what a relief that was.
I am also not a very fertile person. I was married 8.5 years to my ex husband and never used bc and never had a child with him. My husband now is not particularly fertile, either. So we're not like some lush garden of eden or anything. I've also known other women to get pregnant before they've had their first period postpartum.
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Sorry, my explanation with the numbers wasn't very clear. The numbers I gave were just to explain the probabilities, not the actual study. There were actually several independent studies analyzed to form the Bellagio Consensus, which LAM is based on. Since that time, the results have been replicated in several more studies that have replicated the results with varying sample sizes.
The 6% of women whose periods return before 6 months may not be as great an estimate in all places, since there was a big difference between the number of women whose periods returned in one place vs. another, so while the world average may be 6%, it is significantly higher in some places and significantly lower in others.
As far as your own case is concerned, you were obviously one of the women whose fertility returned early. That has nothing to do with your fertility at other times, I got pregnant the first cycle I tried, and now I'm 19 months postpartum and haven't ovulated yet. If you had already had a period before you got pregnant, you did not qualify for LAM. Your surprise pregnancy was a minipill and condom failure, not a LAM failure.
As far as the other people you know who got pregnant before their first period are concerned, I don't know their situations. If they were not exclusively breastfeeding (including pumped bottles or pacifiers) or their babies were older than 6 months, this is much more likely, and they did not qualify for LAM. Hence, these are not LAM failures. If they were exclusively breastfeeding babies under 6 months and got pregnant before their first period, that is a very rare case, and just because you happen to know somebody who it happened to does not mean that it happens more frequently than numerous studies have shown.
You really can't say that LAM does not work just because things that are similar to LAM fail more frequently. That's like saying, "I took my BCP most days, so I thought I couldn't get pregnant." If you want to discredit LAM, you have to discredit it using cases that qualify.
The OP was asking about her particular situation, and she said that she is exclusively breastfeeding a baby under 6 months, and until now, she has been in amenorrhea. That means that until now (if she did not use pacifiers or expressed milk), she qualified under the conditions of LAM and is not likely pregnant. Now, she does not qualify for LAM since she is no longer in amenorrhea, so she should not count on breastfeeding to space her babies, as your case illustrates.
Neither or right or wrong.
