To think that it's a bit stupid to make breastfeeding compulsory?

[puntasticusername]

I mean, really, WTAF?

Breastfeeding made compulsory by UAE

Though I do have to grudgingly admire Lenore Skenazy for coming up with the phrase "sucking the choice out of parenting" to describe these sorts of initiatives.

ISBN I absolutely take your point about people valuing convenience more than doing the best for their children, but if women had proper support, they would not on the whole find bf so challenging. I loved it because it was not a faff - baby wakes up at night, latch on, feed baby, wind baby, settle baby. Out and about? No faff with heating bottles, just sit down and feed baby as above. I'm lazy, me.

Theo - you have said that the unit banned formula.

This suggests that it was the policy of the hospital not to allow women to bring formula in.

I don't believe that there can have been any formal or informal policy banning formula in the maternity unit your sister was cared for in. Namely because at least 1 woman in 5 who would have given birth in that hospital would not be breastfeeding at all.

If a midwife behaved inappropriately towards your sister in trying to compel her to breastfeed then that is a different issue - that's malpractice. But you are suggesting that there was a formal policy not to allow women to use formula in the unit she was in.

"but if women had proper support, they would not on the whole find bf so challenging. I loved it because it was not a faff"

Sadly, no amount of skilled support will stop breastfeeding being something that you can't get someone else to do for you, something that sometimes takes a long time, something that can involve transient soreness, something that involves you having to use your body in an intimate way.

It's the basic nature of breastfeeding that a lot of people struggle with.
(I'm not dismissing the existence of severe breastfeeding problems by the way, but common sense and a knowledge of history tells me that overwhelming and intractable breastfeeding difficulties are not the norm, except in cultures where formula feeding is embraced with enthusiasm, as in the UK).

ISBN I absolutely take your point about people valuing convenience more than doing the best for their children, but if women had proper support, they would not on the whole find bf so challenging.

^^this

Breastfeeding is made way more challenging by the constant propagation of seriously detrimental bf 'advice'. That and a formula culture that has totally skewed expectations of what is normal for a baby and I say that as someone who ff my first 2 children.

Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable

I don't know anyone who didn't breast feed because they couldn't, or because they felt their breasts were inherently sexual. The main reason, as selfish as it sounds was wanting to have time off!

Not having to do all the night feeds, being able to socialise and drink (to slight excess!), going back to work very early because they want to, being able to have time away from the baby/their children in general for a good few hours at a time. Mostly MC yummy mummy types in pretty equal relationships in terms of who takes care of the DC - BF doesn't really fit with that sort of equality ime.

In societies where this sort of equality isn't expected I imagine this law wouldn't sound quite so extreme as it does to our western ears.

{feel the burn!}

Inevitably there will be HUGE, frothing outrage at the thought of someone being forced to breastfeed, seeing it as a massive infringement of a woman's human rights and akin to torture. The fact that hundreds of thousands of women have been forced to bottle-feed in the UK over the past few years by dint of casual and endemic formula supplementation of breastfed babies in UK maternity units and as a result of shit breastfeeding advice by health professionals is on the other hand seen as unfortunate but certainly not as awful as women being forced to breastfeeding.

Forced breastfeeding = torture and cruelty
Forced bottlefeeding = bit of a shame but no big deal really

Not the same things at all.

Hi babydubs I ff after 2 bad breastfeeding starts because I couldn't continue, so now you know at least one person. I really wanted to bf and subsequently I bf a third child for over 2 years and worked and socialised at the same time but serious latch issues on all 3 and an absolutely clueless team of health care professionals who had no idea what was causing the feeding problems meant I could not keep going on the other 2. Loving breastfeeding as much as I do, I still would not have gone through what I did on my last child 3 times but had I got proper bf advice on my first who knows what might have happened.

Forced breastfeeding = torture and cruelty Totally wrong
Forced bottlefeeding = bit of a shame but no big deal really Totally wrong

Support bf, stop allowing the media to spout bf myths a la Dr Christian and have a bf ad paid for by the formula industry but developed by the NHS before and after every formula ad, stop allowing the forumal industry to make claims of health benefits of virtually untested health additions to their products. Then don't force anybody to do anything IMO.

ISBN lack of support does not equal forcing.

anothernumberone I will now amend my statement,

"I don't know anyone [other than one lovely mumsnetter] who didn't breast feed because..."

(of course I do know there are lots of lovely mumsnetters who couldn't rather than didn't want to, I was just referring to my social circle, who DH has just reminded me are actually a bunch of winos... which explains a lot!)

I had huge support over breastfeeding with dd and was as committed to breastfeeding as anyone could be. She was 10 years old when I finally got the explanation of why she was unable to suckle effectively (genetic condition), so I couldn't have got away with it under some special dispensation for disabled children either.

I am certainly prepared to froth at the thought that a child would her would be condemned to die because of some stupid law.

And while I'm at it, I shall also do a little quiet frothing at the quiet assumption that someone like me can't possibly have been dedicated to breastfeeding.

"ISBN lack of support does not equal forcing"

If you strongly encourage a mother to do something or give her misleading information which will seriously damage her ability to breastfeed, at a time when she is at her most vulnerable (ie in the 48 hours after birth) it is reasonable to interpret that as coercion to ff.

The misuse of formula supplements for healthy full-term supposedly babies that is happening in hospitals around the world is sabotaging many women's attempts to breastfeed.

CakePunch - as you've said, I'm really, really interested to see how they can actually enforce this and if bf will be allowed in public. Having spent a fair amount of time in the UAE and having been "lucky" enough to have had numerous sexual advances made on me (men rubbing themselves behind me in shops, offered money for sex, followed from behind by cars driving slowly and shouting) I cannot begin to imagine how any woman will be able to bf in public.

For me it was the opposite, ISBN. The enthusiasm and encouragement (not to say pressure) for breastfeeding at my local hospital was such that I found it even harder to accept that my dd was being breastfed on demand, from my overflowing breasts, and still starving. I just couldn't get my head round that this could happen: it wasn't like anything I had been told either at antenatal course or in the hospital.

Even when dd was visibly growing weaker and increasingly lethargic, nobody looked me in the eye and said "this isn't working, there is some reason this isn't working". I was encouraged to go on a regime of pumping and syringe feeding that exhausted me: I still can't think about that time without feeling ill.

When I was in the postnatal ward a nurse went round the ward first thing and asked the new mothers how they intended to feed; if you said "breast" she beamed at you, if you said "bottle" she shook her head and looked serious. I don't think that can be taken as ubiquitous coercion to bottlefeed.

I am not saying I'm not happy my hospital supported breastfeeding. On the whole I think it was good thing to do. But I do wish somebody could have said "sometimes things go wrong that are nothing to do with you as a woman, or with the support given to you".

I think statistics in the uk are a bit swayed. Personally I don't know anyone who bottlefed their babies and I know a lot of people so surely it must be quite a high ratio breast feeding? I'm assuming in comparison it means no one bf in other areas? Why is this?

I am super lazy, hence bf as would find the whole cleaning/ prepping/ buying formula such a faff. I also worked full time fairly early, dh did night wakings ( settled without feeds after 12 weeks), and had evenings out

CakePunch - a quick look round t'interweb suggests that culturally the UAE is supportive of public breastfeeding. Probably more than you generally find in the US.

here

Me too cory. I bf DS2 for 18 months and supplemented with high calorie formula after 6 months. I did expressing, NG feeding and all sorts and it was a complete nightmare. I had so many professionals involved and the HV kept telling me I should be feeding him more. I know now that his suck was weak because of hypotonia in his mouth but at the time nobody knew what was wrong.

DS4 has a cleft lip and palate. He can't breastfeed from source at all and no wetnurse would have made a difference. He was fed expressed milk until 5 months and mostly formula with a bit of ebm since then.

Well UAE has it's issues. No argument there.

But overall, I think Isbn is making some excellent points.

And refusing to answer other points that are being made, Amanda- like what would you do with babies who despite being breastfed on demand with a carefully monitored latch still fail to thrive?

I live in a GCC country which is more conservative than the UAE and I would definitely say that breastfeeding in public is more acceptable here than it is even in England. You won't get hassled for doing it, at least not by the locals. Also, there are more places for women to breastfeed (every mall etc has a women's prayer room where even non-Muslims can go and do a feed), there are nursing rooms in all the baby shops, and there isn't a problem with feeding in cafes etc as long as you are reasonably discreet.

This all boils down to the fact that the Qu'uran states that it is the RIGHT of all infants to be breastfed until they are two, or earlier if they naturally wean before then.

But, one of the big problems health professionals are facing here is that breastfeeding rates are incredibly low, especially among the local population. This has a lot to do with the fact that everyone has a maid (local families nearly always have one maid per child) and the maid does all the feeding, so most kids nowadays here are raised on formula.

There is a lot of chin-scratching going on about how to change this, and I guess this law has come about as a result. It's not the ideal way to do it (understatement!), and it will get largely ignored and won't be enforced I am sure, but that's the nature of life here, they often come up with daft rules to try and tackle social problems unsuccessfully.

How will the authorities who recruit these wetnurses ensure that their own babies get adequately fed?

That used to be a huge problem in Europe in the days of wetnurses that unless women had a very good milk supply and employers were tolerant of it being shared, it meant sacrificing breasfeeding your own child for that of your employer,

isbn are you saying giving those messages are tantamount to making an act illegal??
That would be akin to saying that (a) the media bombards women with messages to not become engineers and (b) a law is passed that a woman cannot become an engineer, are one and the same.
There is a massive difference!

Well, I don't think that question can neccessarily be answered in a straightforward way that could be applied to all cases.
These things are complex. Each situation needs assessing on its own merits.
Some women are advised to give formula as a supplement when it's not actually necessary. A better out one might well be achieved by increasing supply (with post-feed expressing for example) and looking t frequency of feeds and reassessing growth against a thrive line in addition to the centile chart. that very rarely happens. Usually there's a bit of. Drop off and someone says the baby should have some formula.
Milk banking would mean that the baby could have human milk rather than modified cows milk.....
There are several options tbh.

Besides. I don't think anyone here is agreeing that no baby must ever have anything apart from its own mothers b milk via the breast no matter what the circumstances. Rather, I fwlt that Isbn was highlighting some of the issues around lack of bf( which is a problem if you are a baby aiming for optimum health) in the uk.