Huntington Beach lactation consultant performs her job with love
Rachelle King put the 6-week-old baby boy on the scale, but first she took a guess.
The Huntington Beach-based International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, or IBCLC, uses a scale, accurate to 2 grams, to weigh babies she sees on her home visits.
They’re weighed before a breastfeeding session, and again after feeding from each breast, to measure how much milk is being transferred.
King’s client on Thursday, Kaitlyn Ramos of Rancho Santa Margarita, has a very healthy young son. Bowen not only weighed 12 pounds, 2 ounces before breastfeeding, but he drank 2.6 ounces of milk from the first breast.
King guessed that the baby would take 1.2 ounces from the second breast. She was exactly right.
“Auntie Rachelle has a new faith in herself,” she said with a laugh.
King is passionate about her line of work. She started her own lactation support company, Latch Amoré, in January 2021, just a few days after her 40th birthday.
She soon got a large tattoo on her upper right arm, of Marilyn Monroe breastfeeding a baby girl. She said it’s the most personal of her 20 or so tattoos.
“I often get asked if it’s me and my daughter,” King said. “I really need to just start saying yes.”
There is a smaller tattoo of two breasts on her right wrist, and one on her forearm with a uterus and a vagina with flowers growing out of it. Eventually, it will be a full sleeve dedicated to motherhood on her right arm.
“The goal is just to remind myself and other people that mothers are superheroes,” she said. “There’s probably no role in life that deserves more honor and respect.”
King, an Edison High graduate, has two children herself — Scarlett is 13 and Arrow is 7. But she struggled breastfeeding them. She eventually learned she had a benign brain tumor that secretes prolactin, the hormone responsible for milk production.
“When a woman’s body exceeds a certain level of prolactin, the body assumes that it’s pregnant or breastfeeding, and it won’t ovulate,” she explained. “My body thought I was breastfeeding a baby and thought, ‘You don’t need another one.’”
Arrow also suffered from a tongue and lip tie, King said, and she developed postpartum depression and anxiety.
“I’m a really open person, and I’m happy to share my experiences with anyone that will listen,” she said. “I think my clients can appreciate that because they can see that I too have struggled and been vulnerable. I too struggled with breastfeeding, I too had to make a choice about how to feed my child.”
Helping mothers who might also be having a tough time quickly became a passion. She graduated from nursing school in 2015, a year before the birth of Arrow, and soon got a job at Whittier Hospital Medical Center in 2017 as a postpartum nurse.
That was followed by a closer job at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital, from which King was eventually laid off during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. But during that time, she became a Certified Lactation Counselor, then an IBCLC.
“The day I received my severance package was the day I received my exam results from the IBCLC test,” King said. “It was like, ‘This is where I am supposed to be. This is a sign.’”
She came up with the name for Latch Amoré by making a small edit while singing “That’s Amore,” made popular by Dean Martin. She ended up loving the name and it stuck, kind of like a hungry baby during breastfeeding. She gained a following early on by joining the team of Newport Beach-based Nurture Birth, headed by Whitney Lowe, as a postpartum doula and a lactation consultant.
King now goes around Orange County doing house calls for mothers in need. On Fridays, she offers lower-priced office visits in Newport Beach through a partnership with a local midwife, Jennifer Angell.
She wants to help as many people as possible. King contracts with an organization called the Lactation Network that takes insurance, and she offers a sliding scale for lower-income families.
Through a recent partnership, she said her lactation class is now being included in a package from local doula Nicolle Kasch, the owner and founder of Mind Body Baby.
“Now I’ll be presenting myself and my services to her clients,” King said. “We get to establish some kind of a rapport prior to me to showing up in their most vulnerable moment and them undressing in front of a stranger. I like to be cool and comfortable in my class, very light, joking, storytelling. The goal is to let them know, ‘This is who I am. If it’s comfortable to you, I would be a great person to call on for support after a baby comes and you need it.’”
Comfort is key, as is adapting to a mother’s needs. King said she’s not here to push breastfeeding and bash formula feeding; every situation is different.
Ramos, her client on Thursday, is herself a doula. She said King has already visited her three times in Bowen’s young life. Though he has a healthy appetite and is latching well, King has recommended some bodywork as he’s a bit tight.
“Obviously she’s helped a lot because you are so big,” Ramos said, smiling at her son. “Especially for first-time moms, it’s really helpful to have somebody that’s super-knowledgeable like her to give you tips. I know a lot of these things she knows, but she obviously knows a lot more, and I even forgot some of these things. He latched right away when she was here, and I think it’s just because I wasn’t as stressed because I felt supported by her. I was more comfortable; just having her around is amazing.”
King feels that with Latch Amoré, she is part of an amazing community. In the future, she could see herself writing books about breastfeeding.
“I love that my kids are exposed to me talking about breastfeeding and babies and birth,” she said. “For me, it’s really important, especially for young boys, to learn and witness breastfeeding. If our young boys can learn that the primary purpose of the breast is for nourishment, and they can learn this before they hit puberty and realize that breasts are sexually attractive, I think our society could be so different in very positive ways. Maybe we’d have fewer instances of people giving a side-eye to a woman breastfeeding on the street but being happy to see a Victoria’s Secret ad.”
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