Ghilah, in its original sense, is that a man has intercourse with his wife while she is still nursing. The Prophet ﷺ explained: “If a nursing woman is approached and conceives, her milk becomes spoiled; the child who feeds on that milk is weakened and remains frail. Later, when he grows up, mounts a horse, and gallops, the debility produced by ghilah overtakes him, so he loses his strength and falls from the saddle. It is, therefore, as though he has been killed—only the deed is hidden, unseen and unnoticed.” This, al-Khattabi observes in Maʿālim al-Sunan.
5 – Ibn al-Qayyim states in his Miftāḥ Dār al-Saʿādah: “Ghilah is intercourse with a woman while she is breastfeeding; it is akin to killing the child, and it overtakes even the accomplished horseman. The Prophet’s ﷺ words, ‘I intended to forbid ghilah, but then I observed the Persians and the Byzantines practising it and it causes their children no harm,’ mean that ghilah produces in the infant what a man who unseats a rider from his horse produces in the rider. Some harm is indeed present, yet it is not fatal to the child. For that reason the Prophet ﷺ guided them to leave it off but did not prohibit it outright. He later resolved to ban it as a precaution against the harm that might reach the suckling, but he concluded that closing this avenue did not outweigh the greater harm that would result from abstaining from marital relations for the entire nursing period. He judged the benefit of permitting intercourse to be weightier than the detriment of closing the door to that potential harm. Noting that the two most numerous and formidable nations—the Persians and the Byzantines—practised it without injury to their offspring, he refrained from prohibiting it. Thus there is no contradiction between the two hadiths. Allah knows best.”
6 – Dr. Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Bār remarks: “The fetus takes all its nourishment from its mother; she supplies it with every nutrient even when that harms her. She gives it calcium, even if that means drawing it from her own bones, and she provides it with iron, even if she herself becomes anemic. She also blocks harmful substances such as urea and carbon monoxide from reaching it, and shields it from toxins that nonetheless circulate within her own body.
It is well known that the nursing infant—especially in the first months—relies entirely on the mother’s milk for sustenance, extracting from it the essential materials needed to build its body, just as…"