To think that "97% of women can breastfeed" is a load of crap

[elliejjtiny]

I've been seeing this phrase a lot over the years, about how 97% of women can breastfeed and all the rest of the people who say they can't just need support.

I would guess that 97% of women can probably produce milk (although I wouldn't be surprised if it was lower) but there is so much more to breastfeeding than the mum producing milk which never seem to be mentioned. Mums with disabilities/medical conditions, babies with disabilities/medical conditions, babies who are born prematurely, mums separated from their babies and mums on medication that means they can't breastfeed.

When people gaily spout that 97% of women can breastfeed I find is so annoying and inaccurate. It's usually the same people who want the number of c-sections reduced as well and think that everyone can give birth with no interventions, they just need to stay mobile and ignore the nasty doctors.

I actually couldn’t get support. I had a baby in a private hospital with a lactation consultant on staff. But when I went home there was zero support.

There was so much psychological pressure to breastfeed.

My sister who extended breastfed her children (yes, I wrote that correctly) - one of them had so many viruses and illnesses as a baby and the other had two severe allergies.

Despite this, she was on at me constantly about how it was so much better. My child was very rarely sick and had zero allergies. He was formula fed from birth.

My child seemed to get reflux from breastmilk and his GP declined to provide reflux medication (stating they don’t know the long term effects) and told me to continue to formula feed.

I understand where the GP was coming from. Especially after a common adult reflux medication was withdrawn from sale after studies showed it caused cancer.

I knew my child was getting everything they needed from formula. It was better for them. It was a choice to give formula. I don’t regret it.

As others have said it’s a stat about ability of the mother to produce milk - it’s
obviously not the full picture, but everyone knows that?

Fwiw despite lots of people on mumsnet talking about their inability to bf, I don’t know a single person in real life who wanted to but couldn’t. My entire NCT group, all the women I met at baby groups, my colleagues, my school friends all bf. The only people I know who didn’t bf were my cousins and my SIL, and that was completely through choice.

@EricTheHalfASleeve Their babies either die, are breast fed by another woman or in modern times given formula.

Formula has only existed for 150 years.

What about the other 99,000+ years?

There are historical artefacts of babies bottles in existence- feeding babies animal milk or mixed cereal is not a new phenomenon.

Animal milk and cereals - agricultural products, so about 10,000 years old.

What about the other 90,000 years?

I could and did successfully twice.

It's often better to breastfeed an allergy baby because you can work out triggers before weaning.

To be fair, given your sister had allergy children, maybe the reflux your baby had was a subtle allergy too. This is why support is really important.

If there's one thing we absolutely do not do now it's mind our own business about what other women do with their breasts.

Environmental impact is another be careful what you wish for point. Because even if we had really good data on the impact, pushing the issue when it comes to something only women can do is bad for us as a cohort. Men have higher carbon footprints on average than women anyway, so it's inequitable for greater expectations to fall on us.

It also raises the possibility that if we manage to create formula that's definitely more environmentally friendly, women who want to breastfeed might be subjected to pressure to ff for environmental reasons, whilst all the while having lower carbon emissions rates than men. Bugger that.

(This keeps posting before I'm ready- sorry!)

And lastly, breasfeeding is only free if you don't assign any value to the woman's time, labour or the calories and energy needed, assuming you're excluding any pure financial costs. Another bugger that. Our time, labour and energy have value.

I breastfed my first for three weeks , I stopped for a number of reasons. Uncomfortable feeding in front of others, worried she wasn’t getting enough, lack of knowledge around what breastfeeding should look like and no support/ role models.

my second I did 3 months but ultimately felt similar.
Also with first two i return to work after 4 months and pumping equipment wasnt where it is now.

With my third I did a lot of reading as I really wanted to be successful, I also got a medela pump after much research. I attended breast feeding support classes and did 16 months.

I was born in 1967 and my mum used to say similar about her experience as a new mum in hospital. She said the nursing staff ‘didn’t know what to do with [her]’ and were very impatient and tutted because she insisted on breastfeeding. She was the only woman in the ward who didn’t choose to formula feed.

It’s interesting what you say about the dining room situation. When I was in hospital after giving birth to my eldest in 2008 (I was 41!), I had my meals brought to me BECAUSE I was breastfeeding, so I didn’t have to go to the canteen at all. How times can change. The numbers hadn’t changed much though as there was only me and one other woman breastfeeding in our ward of about ten women. Also, there was only one midwife who seemed to know anything about establishing breastfeeding, but she was an absolute star and put up with me constantly torturing her for help😅

I’d like to say in my experience, or maybe I am lucky in my area, the support now is brilliant, much better than this at least. With both of my babies there was always 2 breastfeeding specialists around on the postnatal ward, I got so so much support from them which was amazing! The midwife who did my day 2 visit was so knowledgable and able to support, feeding team came out as well for extra help and were always on call to come again if needed & the family hub’s here run multiple breastfeeding support sessions each week.

Apart from "having babies too late" I can't see how any of the above is anything more than speculation.

I knew a number of women who were unable to have children back when articifial contraception was still a massive taboo in the society I grew up in (a nationalist part of NI - even years later when I myself went for contraception to the local health clinic I was quizzed about how long I'd been going out with this boy: I was 20 years old FFS!)

There have always been infertile and low-fertility couples: if the latter marry at 19 or 20 and never use contraception, they're far more likely to have a baby over the years than the same couple only beginning to try at 35+. But the couple's fertility is the same.

There's no evidence that I'm aware of that suggests that actual capacity for fertility is falling, as opposed to effective fertility, which is more life-style dependent.

Oh and caesarean rates are also related to hospitals wanting babies to be born during working hours. Again, not the woman's body that has changed, just that obstetricians don't want to be up at night when the human body is more likely to give birth.

(Though there is some slight evidence that the numbers of babies born with big heads, and surviving, has increased since CS began to be commonplace. I'm not sure if it's a good thing that more babies are surviving or a bad thing that those babies are passing on their genes for outsized heads. TBH I'm not sure how reliable that study really was either - I can't remember where I came across it.)

I could breastfeed but followed Drs advice not to since I was on antidepressants. For me it was a hassle to sterilise bottles etc and I would have loved to breastfeed but it wasn't in my baby's best interest.
Maybe 97% are able to breastfeed- that doesn't mean 97% should breastfeed. I think any reason not to is valid. If you don't want to breastfeed then don't. A baby needs food, care and love - however he gets it isn't important.

Anecdotally I think I didn't produce milk. I breastfed for about a week, pumped every night and after 7 days even the pump couldn't get a single drop. It just completely stopped, couldn't be explained. My mam couldn't breastfeed me or my sister and her Mam couldn't breastfeed her so I imagine genetics come in to it a bit too.

I don't really care what others think about it, I know what I experienced.

Even if you take the public health aspect out, it's still an important discussion because of the very point that women should have choice. It needs to be informed choice though and if misinformation is not challenged it can't be. I don't really care how other women feed their babies, but I do care if they then go on to say and do things that influence others to make decisions that are not evidence based. Or not even that - people are entitled to ignore information if they want, it's a free country, but they do, in my opinion, have a right to receive up to date, evidence based information. It bothers me if people think they are making decisions based on facts but they have in fact been misled, often by anecdote.
I think a lot of people underestimate how much misinformation there is out there. There is plenty on this thread alone. And the quality of professional advice varies hugely. I had my DD in an area with fairly high breastfeeding rates and I got pretty good support in hospital, even in the 90s. She has just had her first baby in a part of the country with one of the lowest bf rates and I have been appalled by the attitudes and knowledge level of most of the HCPs she has had dealings with both in the hospital and the community. She's exclusively breastfeeding at 4 months in spite of rather than because of the professionals.
It is a really shitty thing to do to tell women that they are bad mothers if they didn't breastfeed, stupid if they misunderstood something or whatever, but surely we should be able to say "sorry, that's not actually true" or " sounds like you were misled by your MW" when people are stating things that just aren't supported by facts?

I haven't seen the data for that statistic, and it's quite possible that the data sample was skewed.

However, I agree with others that as mammals, if the number of women couldn't physically feed their children within a culture where it was the norm and supported well wasn't the vast majority, we'd be dead. Maybe not 97% high, a lot things in the human body can go wrong, and it may be that things in lifestyles we've changed to over the years has had an impact, but it's still most of us. A lot of the issues are cultural bias around breastfeeding, breasts, and mothers.

Also, I think you mean mothers with certain disabilities and conditions, not all of us, babies with certain disabilities and medical conditions that impact their feeding. As others said, being disabled doesn't automatically mean someone can't breastfeed. We just get a different flavour of shite for trying.

Part of the reason I got so much shite with my kids, particularly my older two, was because I was a young disabled mother. I spent my entire first pregnancy having anytime I dared mentioned intending to breastfeed being told that I probably couldn't. Midwives challenged it, telling me 'you know you don't have to try that', being told how I was the only one on the ward doing it, I wasn't allowed to leave hospital without my son having his sugars tested because it was presumed that I couldn't possible be feeding him well enough as I am. One midwife got social services involved about it, telling me they wanted to talk to me about it (social services thankfully knew it was all BS and went to handle that themselves, I never saw that midwife again). This was all at a hospital that supposedly was meant to be promoting breastfeeding - but it certainly didn't with me.

I got over that hurdle, I then got the remarks about how it's disgusting, how it makes others uncomfortable, how there is nothing wrong with a bottle. After about 3 months or so, I started to get the remarks about how it must be a sexual thing for me.

Mothers get shit on regardless of what we do. The idea that the pressure is all one way or the other is just not true - most of us just see the pressure that we've been under far more clearly.

And that's extremely short-sighted, because there's credible evidence that formula causes autism.

I've at least three autistic kids who were all breastfed for at least 18 months, never had formula (fourth is still on the waiting list for assessment).

There may be as others said some difficulties both autistic mothers and children face in breastfeeding - I know I would get very touched out to the point my skin felt like it was burning from too much touch. I had one child as a baby who wanted space/not to be touched while sleeping from 4 or so months old and so would push away when done with feeding when tired, which did cause some issues trying to ensure she fed well enough (even as a teenager, she's still the type to eat just enough not to be hungry and forget at times that she needs to eat).

Yep some of us just choose not to breastfeed and that’s ok. In this day and age we shouldn’t have to justify ourselves or be made to feel guilty. It’s yet another thing that women are made to feel shit about along with working, not working, ageing, being overweight…the list is endless.

Didn’t breastfeed either of my children. No regrets. They’ve grown up with no detrimental effects from having been formula fed.
It is an incredibly tiny footnote in a person’s long life.

Around the world I think this is probably right. In western society probably not.

Made me smile. I have always thought my being able to breastfeed was linked to thinking sterilising bottles mixing formula (it was more fiddly in the 70s) was too much hassle not to mention the ease of feeding baby in the night . Basically did I manage it based on my idleness gene

There are probably more people who can't (percentage-wise, I mean) these days, because many of these people might have died because modern medical care wasn't available, and some mums will have had surgeries which leave them unable to breastfeed, which again couldn't have happened in the past.
But one of the biggest differences is this is probably the first time period people seem to use the term "fed is best" (maybe as I wasn't a mum in the noughties, I just didn't notice??) -some older mums I know said there used to be a lot of pressure to breastfeed.

As an 18 year-old mum I got lots of free advice/criticism. A kind and wise midwife told me a mother's place was in the wrong and not to worry about it

My grandma had babies in the 50s and had her breasts bound to dry her milk up because breastfeeding was seen as something inconvenient that poor women did. Bottles were better, because you could monitor it apparently.

I also had my first in 2008 and I was lucky in that I didn't have any problems with feeding. But I spent a lot of time on the MN BF boards and a common experience at the time was to have a midwife firmly grasp the back of the baby's head with one hand, your boob with the other, and push the two together, and that was their attempt to help with breastfeeding. Often with no warning!! I found this awful and still do. I hope it is no longer happening.

As a 1970s mum almost all the pressure was to not breast feed.

Realistically we could lower c-section rates - not all emergency sections are true life and death emergencies, more that continuing down the vaginal birth path is riskier than a society we are willing to accept. That's a good thing. If we did half the number of emergency sections, some babies would be born fine, but many more would die or have lifelong consequences. For the mums, many would be fine, some would die, and the amount of life-changing birth injuries would increase.

Similar for breastfeeding. If formula and wet nursing were not options, a much higher proportion of mums would manage to breastfeed, but of those who struggle, some babies would die, handsome would survive but very much not thrive, be weaker, and more likely to succumb from illness and infections. Some would survive but malnutrition from birth would have long-term consequences.

So it's good that we don't have to give birth vaginally and breastfeed at all cost.

For what it's worth I had c-sections because I didn't want to risk vaginal injury and am delighted with my choices.

I chose to bottle feed my first and ended up breastfeeding my second. I didn't find breastfeeding hard, I just didn't want to do it with my first. Interestingly I have a lot of conversations with mums that had started and then stopped breastfeeding, that they didn't particularly want to do it, felt pressurised by the NHS, and quickly move to formula using lack of support as an excuse!

And that makes sense to me, because there's only so much that support can do with breastfeeding. No amount of support can that you sleep when you have a cluster feeding baby. No amount of support can let you properly heal from birth where you have a cluster feeling baby. Yes they can help with latches and holds, and bit of cheerleading, but not much practical support is going to make getting up 10 times a night any less difficult. So I think a lot of women mean it's very difficult/I was too tired/I wanted to share feeding, but say it's lack of support.

I think most women can. And most people are not disabled. There isn’t enough knowledge and support to enable them, especially if coming from an anti bread feeding culture.

I think I it’s about women who biologically can breastfeed.

I could have biologically breastfed, however, I take medication that makes my milk toxic for baby so I don’t.

i also do believe that with the right support most women can birth vaginally, but also fully understand that we need medical intervention for the women and babies who would have died in the past.