To think it’s disingenuous to say breastfeeding is free?

[Jerrui]

When pregnant encountered lots and lots of breastfeeding promotion- often it’s cited it being free as a benefit.

I have personally found as soon as you actually have a baby and are feeding it there is absolutely zero support. In my area there is no infant feeding team etc just community midwife who told me to substitute BF with FF at two weeks old when baby failed to regain birth weight.

I have spent hundreds of pounds on lactation consultant, double electric pump, milk storage, trying to keep breastfeeding going.

I have added formula top up and was shocked how cheap it is. We got bottles for free in those Emma’s diary type packs, and Aldi formula costs £2 a week.

I think trying to promote breastfeeding as a more economic option to pregnant women is stupid.
I feel actually public funds would be much better spend on training and recruiting to provide actual support to mothers trying to breastfeed, rather than health promotion with misleading, simplistic and dumbed down messages.
I feel it’s no wonder breastfeeding is mainly the preserve of the middle classes when you have to invest so much money to get any help!

EmiliaAirheart women who needed the money would just switch to formula though. Like with all these issues only the middle classes can afford to spend £££ on any issues everyone else would just move to formula if it was too expensive.

Except when you have a baby already struggling with weight gain, who refuses bottles, cup feeding, syringe feeding etc. Then you just suck it up have to make bf work, even if it's financially costly...

@Socialcarenope

I had two bras One on one in the wash, plus a soft sleep one. Yes I needed clothes but that was due to weight gain not breastfeeding who has 6 bras ???

We are all different but for me my total outlay was less than a steriliser and some bottles

I'd like to see much more acknowledgment by the NHS of what 'nearly all' women can BF means.

Have you tried to find the research underlying this statement? I am sure it is there.
I don't think a top level NHS page is the place to go into such detail. For someone trying to find out about BF, stating that 'nearly all women can BF' is perfectly accurate I think.

@TheOrigRights whilst I agree with you on one hand, the very real problem is that an awful lot of midwives and health visitors take statements like that, adopt them as a mantra, and use them possibly without realising to make women who are struggling to feel undermined rather than look into the reasons they are struggling and help them to deal with it. They don't then appreciate the extent to which women feel failure because they have been told most women do it.

Turn the clock back a ce turn or two and more women died from puerperal fever arising from secondary infections relating to the breast than from the child birth itself.

It's not at all accurate and very misleading.

It would be far better to state that 'Some women find they produce enough milk and are able to BF reasonably easily. Some women produce too much milk and may like to consider donating it to NICU. Here's how to do this... Other women will have milk delay and/or low supply or struggle to BF. This is what you can do about this and the risk factors that make it more likely...'

@RidingMyBike couldn’t have put that better.

Absolutely agree with you.

[quote gogohm]@Socialcarenope

I had two bras One on one in the wash, plus a soft sleep one. Yes I needed clothes but that was due to weight gain not breastfeeding who has 6 bras ???

We are all different but for me my total outlay was less than a steriliser and some bottles [/quote]
I needed 6 because I'd often have to change twice a day so 2 in the wash, 2 drying, 1 on and one ready to wear later. I had 4 sleep bras otherwise I'd have to wash them daily.

I also had a steriliser and bottle so I could leave DS, though both ended up unused.

I had three - one on, one in the wash, one clean. And two sleep bras.

Your comment about who has 6 made me chuckle. I must have 12 and that's not many compared to many women for non bf times.

As I've said before expenses were:

2 button up nighties
3 bras
Pads
Camillosan
Books
Counselling when I failed
Rental of industrial breast pump (donation to NCT)
Then I still had to buy bottles, steriliser, etc.

With dd because I was so determined not to fail again and better educated about bf due to the first time and knew the first 6 weeks would be largely confines to cluster feeding the baby, an au-pair for the 3.5 year old and new and more comfy bras. A lot changed between 94 and 98!

Only if breastfeeding was so easy then there won't be nearly 80% babies bottle fed at 6 weeks. Something to consider for people who claim breastfeeding is easy

I think ultimately we're confusing 'need' with 'want'.

At its most basic, breastfeeding, if you can do it, is free. If baby can latch and supply is ok, you can feed a baby. No refugee in a war-torn area is saying they can't breastfeed their baby unless they have nursing bras and breast-pads, an au pair and a consultant. When you strip all the niceties and trappings away, breastfeeding, in general, doesn't require the purchase of specific items. The same cannot be said of formula feeding.

I wouldn't have been pregnant in a war torn area. If by some miracle I had managed to get pregnant and then carry the baby to term, I wouldn't have survived the birth. And quite possibly my baby wouldn't have either. All of that means I wouldn't have been BFing.

@ThirdElephant

I think ultimately we're confusing 'need' with 'want'.

At its most basic, breastfeeding, if you can do it, is free. If baby can latch and supply is ok, you can feed a baby. No refugee in a war-torn area is saying they can't breastfeed their baby unless they have nursing bras and breast-pads, an au pair and a consultant. When you strip all the niceties and trappings away, breastfeeding, in general, doesn't require the purchase of specific items. The same cannot be said of formula feeding.

Also, in the war torn countries, infant mortality rates are the highest. That's not something people should look as the benchmark.

@ThirdElephant what is the mother and infant survival rate in war zones/areas of the third world enduring famine.

I'd have died 200 years ago. As would my son. Only the survivors continue to be breastfed. Have you any idea how inadequate I felt 27 years ago because I felt my failure to feed my son in a different era would have resulted in his death.

My DD was prem and for one reason and another, direct breastfeeding never worked out. For four months I expressed for her. Spent about £35 on an electric double pump that worked great, and another £30 on a single manual pump for emergencies, and then maybe £10 on bottles. So the whole four months cost me about £75.

After four months pumping was no longer really working out because DD was aware enough to not like the fact that I was spending around 2.5 hours s day pumping and effectively ignoring her in that time. Switched to formula and it cost us ~ £10 a week (Cow and Gate) for four months. So those four months cost me about £180 ish. We already had the bottles. Weaning was starting to establish after that and £ per week was reducing, but even so we probably spent about £300 on formula alone total.

So neither was free, but "breastfeeding" (expressing) was waaaayy cheaper.

@RidingMyBike, I think (from memory) it is believed to be between about 2 and 4% of women who will be unable to produce enough milk, purely from a physiological angle. However, once other factors (particularly in the Western world) are taken into account, the real figure is probably rather higher. The rise in birth intervention can indirectly factor into this, for example. Babies separated from mother at birth, blood loss, medications or meds resulting in sleepy babies etc etc. Even just a bad latch from tongue tie or inexperience in the first few days or weeks, can result in less milk being transfered from the breast and a drop in supply. There are so many influencing factors in this matter. So when people say that the vast majority of women have enough milk, it can conveniently ignore the many other indirect causes of low milk supply and end up patronising women.

As ever, more support, more support, more support is needed x

Yanbu

You do realise that in 1915, only just over 100 years ago, 15% of babies didn't survive to their first birthday.

Only the fitter stronger more fertile women would have babies to start with, most/all with problematic births and haemorrhage were unlikely to survive. Neither were prem babies. So they weren't BFing for a start. Babies whose mothers couldn't BF or who didn't produce enough milk for them, who couldn't access a wet nurse, if they didn't die of dehydration or jaundice, became 'failure to thrive'. That's means they'd be very susceptible to disease, including diseases we now vaccinate against. If they did survive they'd be stunted for growth and not develop to their full potential (depriving a growing infant brain of calories means it can't develop properly).

Also, in the war torn countries, infant mortality rates are the highest. That's not something people should look as the benchmark.

It's pretty clear what they're saying. They're not actually saying it's the benchmark just milk flows regardless, it's on the tap.

RidingMyBike I think you are confusing the concept that breastfeeding is easy with the concept that breastfeeding is expensive because most women need expensive bras in order to breast feed.

Yeah, I'm annoyed at the way breastfeeding is presented as zero cost, but I'm not really thinking of costs as being only in terms of money.

It has a cost to the mother - it is exhausting, draining and means that you're unable to be apart from your baby for anyone else (including the baby's dad) to take care of. It was being aware of all that prior to giving birth that meant I was mentally geared up to the months of hard slog - and it is a hard slog. I breastfed each of my kids for a year, including through a bout of mastitis, and those first 3-4 months were like running a marathon every day.

So, I agree with you - I don't think it does women any favours for midwives to insinuate us that breastfeeding is free and simple. That just leaves us feeling inadequate when we experience how hard it can be.

Very well said, couldn't agree more

Yanbu. Wasn’t for me - I burned so much energy breastfeeding I felt hungry all the time so ate more. Definitely bought more snacks than I do now 😂

Some of these road blocks to breastfeeding are so pathetically minor it’s a massive disservice to any pregnant woman who reads this. Honestly bra and nightgown cost? Food? You need to eat anyway or feed the baby, you eat more when pregnant.
How about asking why Norwegian ladies are more successful? Nipple formation or genetics of the babies mouth?
Breastfeeding can be extremely low cost but right now UK societal and health care structure makes it harder to initiate or maintain.
It can be free.

I breastfed all 3 of my boys - now 3, 7 and 12 - and I always considered it free. I bought an expensive pump (they were not cheap back then) while feeding my first and it lasted all three. Having said that; I was a SAHM so didn't need to pump while I was at work. I could have got along without it really. I also bought washable breast pads that, again, lasted all tree babies.
I had to stop BF'ing my last at around 7 months due to a nasty infection - I could not believe the price of bottles and formula and sterilising stuff. So yes - breastfeeding is essentially free IMO 🤷‍♀️