Lactation support conference in Ireland - the quiet part out loud

Poor babies. Condemned to a life of disappointment from day one. What a sickening little brute he is.

They probably were more successful because of higher levels of community support and more people in their circle having breastfeeding experience. And a much smaller proportion of children were firstborns, so the mother herself would usually have experience.

If they couldn't feed, or wouldn't because of social status, or if the mother died, the best option was a wet nurse. Everyone knew that substitute foods were a last resort and very rarely successful.

If a wet nurse wasn't possible they would have tried (depending on age of baby and time in history) watered down cow or goat milk, very thin gruel or rice, watered down clear soup, weak tea, or bread soaked in water or diluted milk. Very little was known about nutritional composition of any food so the main concern was to avoid overwhelming delicate infant stomachs with anything too rich. This was sometimes just about enough to keep older babies alive, but before about 3 months it was almost never successful. The lack of the immune benefits of breastfeeding was also a massive disadvantage, given medical treatments at the time.

Babies were exclusively breastfed by their mother. Or by another woman. Or they died. If you spend any time with historical death certificates the number of babies with marasmus (wasting and starvation) as cause of death is heartbreaking.

When formula was invented in the mid 19th century it was not much better nutritionally than the home concoctions, but the worse problem was the invention of bottles with rubber tubes or teats rather than open feeding cups. Advice was specifically to not wash them more than once every few weeks, so bacterial build up killed far more than the malnutrition.

I agree, undermining women seems to be quite de rigueur these days. The thing is, all I can see it doing is backfiring massively because it'll piss off so many women. I long for the day when the women of Ireland give these men a 'fuck off' you could hear from Mars.

He knows it's bollocks. Transactivism is all about decoupling women from their biology in order that men with male biology can be women.

See also Monroe Berkdorf demanding that women not centre their biology in any way during the women's march in London because it's 'exclusive'.

'Pussy hats' were the headwear du jour as a protest about Trump and his grab 'em by the pussy comments (🤮).

Bergdorf took exception to the sea of pink hats. I think he even said the quiet bit out loud and in that not every women has a vagina.

Meaning men.

Fascinating. Love it.

In my family a relative born in the late 1920s was kept alive for a short time with a mixture of brandy and whey from a fountain pen dropper. She was a twin, the other twin died and she weighed under 3lb. Mum was completely beyond beyond, not at all well and unable to do anything so granny, mother of 11, swung in and held the fort with the fountain pen until mum could take over. Everyone else expected ths baby to die as well but granny wasn't having it.
I rather hope there was a lot more whey than brandy! But when the mother told me the story we didn't get that far. That baby grew up and had children of her own, sounds far fetched but it worked.

They were more successful at breastfeeding because they were surrounded by women who had long experience of it. There were also more women who had breastfed half a dozen or more babies, so were absolute experts. Sadly that is expertise that has been mostly lost, and we now have "experts" whose knowledge is largely theoretical.

(And yes of course there were wet nurses for women who genuinely couldn't feed a baby - but in most cases throughout history, babies were wet nursed because the mother was seriously ill or dead. There are very, very few cases of non-starving women who truly cannot produce enough milk to keep a baby alive.)

Brandy was a popular cure-all. My great grandmother was given brandy enemas on her deathbed to keep her going until the family could get there to say goodbye. Probably not with a fountain pen filler.

The family was strict chapel, so theoretically teetotal, but very fond of a brandy-based tonic¹. Brandy (or whisky), milk and glucose was the cold remedy of choice. Brandy was switched to sherry for young children.

¹ Trifle also had an exemption. Driving after a portion of my grandmother's xmas trifle would have been decidedly unwise.

There were always a few who employed the services of a wet-nurse because they could afford to and didn't want the hassle of feeding their own child; they probably though erroneously that they would get their figures back better, too. (Heavens, can you imagine Lady Caroline Lamb sticking to breast-feeding her own baby for more than ten days or so? She'd have got bored and wandered off to see if she could find Byron. Though it may be that I malign her and she was a devoted mama.)

That's why you get the horror stories in novels about wealthy women whose hired wet-nurse turned out to be "addicted to the bottle", which did the baby no good at all.

In more recent years, my grandmother gave birth to nine children of whom eight survived, and breast-fed all of them except the last one, for whom she simply didn't produce any milk to speak of. She was mortified, and her dear old nanny (who still lived with the family and looked after all the children once they were weaned) went and found a woman in a local village whose baby had died and who was prepared to use her otherwise surplus milk to feed the rector's little daughter.

Oh yes, same here with the trifle!
I have now been wondering why the whey and brandy was opted for because of course formula was available then. Maybe that granny had Opinions about formula, or maybe she just had to get on with whatever was at hand, maybe it was the middle of the night and no shops open.
Whatever it was it must have been her experience with her own 11 that gave her the grit to not give up, and you can't buy that.
I'd love to have 10 minutes to ask her.

edited to add, that was 11 living children, there was a gap in the middle and although I don't know for sure I suspect that such a fecund union and no effective birth control wouldn't have had that gap unless there were at least 2 others who died. It certainly happened to other women in my family of the same generation.

Oh how I wish these men would all just fuck off.

Some interesting history here. Our female ancestors were formidable, weren't they.

I'd forgotten how insulting some of the TRAs were, not wanting women to talk about their bodies, ffs.

Back when LLL were a force for good. I wonder what they'd do these days, probably send some men to show it's done.

Good, serves them right.

Well, not so good if actual mothers now lack a resource which might have been a help in the nutrition of actual babies.

I'd forgotten how insulting some of the TRAs were, not wanting women to talk about their bodies, ffs.

I was just thinking the same @MarjorieWestriding. In fact I’d managed to forget Bergdof even existed, which was pleasant while it lasted. I still can’t really believe the audacity of that
message about centring reproductive systems at a WOMEN’S event. 😡

I would bet he wouldn't mind men centring their penises reproductive systems at a men's event.

Or to bag copies of the recordings...

Surely they should be advocating for women delaying mastectomies if there's any chance they might want to have children / breastfeed

This lady could have spoken at the conference.