To say if you don't want to bf then fine but don't lie that you can't

[Lily1986]

A friend is ff her baby son. She tried to bf but gave up after a few days. Privately she told me that she didn't like having to bf and wanted her dh to share the load. To everyone else she is saying that she didn't produce enough milk and is seeking sympathy from others that her body wasn't able to provide for her baby. Really laying it on thick.

I really don't have a problem with how anyone chooses to feed their baby.

AIBU to feel angry at this friend trying to make people feel sorry for her?

Also I don't care if people do lie about it - for as long as we have people comparing ff to smoking/drug taking during pregnancy, then it's perfectly legitimate, imo ,for a woman to avoid all that and just lie to get the militant bf off their back!

It's become very clear to me that women feel pressured to bf and to ff. I breast feed (but was never pressured to) and in tje hospital I was heavily pressured to give formula despite there being no real reason to.

And sorry - "militant breast feeder"? Wtf?

Look up thread hairy, at the posts comparing ff to drug taking during pg - that's a militant bf.

All mothers that didn't breast feed should lined up against a wall and shot.
Fuck them and their unholy, fabricated, tenuous reasons!!!!

I don't know if I should stand with you or not proud I dodnt bf ds1 but did the others. Obviously I didn't love him as much!

I haven't decided how I'm going to feed this time.

I have never in my life come across anyone who judges a mother for FF or BF. Who are these women/men? Where do they live? I've done combined feeding with both my children and no one has ever batted an eyelid. Only hear about things like this on the internet.

Nor me fakebook I don't think anyone has ever been interested.

I have been judged in rl for ff by two midwives, a hv and the lady I went to see at the 'sling library' who asked why I wasn't going to (like it was any of her business) then shook her head .

I'm sure I heard of a study done recently in Norway regarding pollutants being passed on in breastmilk. Not that that is my reason for ff but there are different sides to everything.

Seems some of you world be horrified if I were to tell you I gave up bf due to one baby not being able to do it and the other because I wasn't producing enough milk. But on both counts I was told this by health care pro. So it is possible your friend has been told the same.

I spent many years feeling bad about my apparent inability to bf which in hindsight was due to a lack of support and anxiety on my part. Not helped by some very judgmental comments sent my way in the past. Particularly from my sister who found it so easy and couldn't understand why I found it hard.

My children are 7 and 5 now so I am long over the whole bf thing and unaffected by comments these days but I could put myself in your friends position. There is a disproportionate amount of judging about how other women choose to feed their babies. Ff is a perfectly acceptable way to feed a baby and not poison. Few would deny bf is better but when you consider the crap most people are happy to feed their children later in life it does seem a ridiculous argument to be having.

You're not being unreasonable, my friend did exactly the same thing. It's hard enough trying to convince others that breastfeeding can be achieved with a little patience and guidance, without people lying about how hard it is and encouraging others to not bother trying at all.

Thing is, if you say anything to the contrary you're seen as a breastfeeding nazi, so I've learned just to shut it.

This:

karmabeliever Sat 24-Nov-12 21:11:39
"The thing is though, is that it is being said on this thread that unless you go to a doctor and have low milk supply formally diagnosed, then women are either lying or mistaken."

Or rather: it is assumed on this thread that a woman who makes a possibly erroneous statement about the reasons for her failure is lying and being disrespectful towards those who have been genuinely diagnosed.

I had no idea what went wrong for us- except I could see clearly it was nothing to do with dd's latch, which was textbook. Any statement made by me was therefore quite likely to be wrong- as were those of the medics attending me- but it was bloody well not disrespectful: we were all stumbling around in the dark and grabbing at straws.

If I hadn't happened to have a visibly abundant supply, I would almost certainly have seized on the idea that I wasn't producing enough, not out of disrespect but because I seemed to have exhausted all the other possible explanations (frequency of feed, latch, support etc).

Dd has been misdiagnosed a fair few times later in life: in other words, somebody has given an explanation for her problems that subsequently could be proved to be incorrect. Does that mean that every time that's happened the medics have been disrespecting the people who really have those particular problems?

Or can we just accept that medicine is an inexact science, that we don't know absolutely everything about the human body, and that most people do actually try their best under the circumstances they find themselves in?

What worra said.

YABU.

I's the logic that gets me: "An extremely high precentage of mums will produce enough milk to bf with perseverance - over 95%...so I wish women who haven't been medically diagsnosed as not having enough milk wouldn't keep saying they didn't have enough milk."

Because 4-5% is so extremely unlikely that anyone that claims it's happened to them has simply got to be lying...

"This is what I am doing and I don't want to discuss it further."

...is a very useful phrase for mothers whatever their feeding choices.

Avoids unwelcome judgement or advice, and also helps to NOT perpetuate unhelpful myths to people who may take them on board and have them affect their own feeding choices.

Hear, hear littlecarrot.

Or..."this is what we are doing, and it works best for us"

What I don't get is that, although the marketing of the big companies has won and that BF is clearly for the minorities, if you even dare to say that maybe BF is good for babies, you get called a nazi and a militant.

As it happens, I didn't have enough milk for DD1 and had to take domperidone for 6 months to even manage to mixed feed.
The only times I have feld judged was by people intrigued because I BF past 6 months.

If gimme's statistics are correct and just over 95% of women can establish adequate milk supply by perseverance, surely that doesn't make the remaining 4+% a myth? There must be plenty of medical conditions that affect less than 5% of the population - does that make them all myths? Is the definition of a fact "something that happens to the majority of the population"

In my books, something that affects a smallish percentage of the population isn't something that could never happen to me, it's certainly not a myth, it's merely something that statistically speaking probably won't happen to me. A "myth" would be the perception that something rare happened very often, not that it could happen in any one given case.