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.

My periods came back at 19 months when I was breastfeeding. But my daughter fed a lot!

Breastfeeding is harder for some women but for others its a lot easier than going completely organic and upf free. Breastfeeding was hard at the beginning (few months for DD, few weeks for DS) but after that it was the easiest thing ever, much easier than cooking everything from scratch (and if I wanted to be upf free I'd have to bake all my bread myself too from specially sourced flours as me and DD have coeliac disease and gf bread and flour mixes are upf), I wouldn't have the time to do that and work full time so I'd have to quit or go part time which means I wouldn't have the extra money I'd need to buy all the more expensive organic foods. All of that is a lot harder than just opening my shirt and letting my baby latch on

Breastfeeding is harder for some women but for others its a lot easier than going completely organic and upf free. Breastfeeding was hard at the beginning (few months for DD, few weeks for DS) but after that it was the easiest thing ever, much easier than cooking everything from scratch (and if I wanted to be upf free I'd have to bake all my bread myself too from specially sourced flours as me and DD have coeliac disease and gf bread and flour mixes are upf), I wouldn't have the time to do that and work full time so I'd have to quit or go part time which means I wouldn't have the extra money I'd need to buy all the more expensive organic foods. All of that is a lot harder than just opening my shirt and letting my baby latch on

I love how you’re refuting the extensive scientific evidence based on your own experience! Infant mortality has nothing to do with it. Have you used Google?

In the past nutrition and feeding approaches were both different so the contraceptive impact of bf lasted for 2+ years. When you add the length of a pregnancy on top it meant a gap of 3+ years. This gap remains in traditional hunter-gatherer communities.

I think it would be more effective to rephrase it to babies being able to breastfeed to be honest. Less guilt / blame on mothers who want to breastfeed but aren’t able to.

I also think that there isn’t enough information given to new mums on the effect of having a disrupted golden hour due to medical intervention / emergency / hospital policy, that a tongue tie can have on milk supply, the fact it can take a few weeks to get a comfortable latch which can lead to mums understandably moving to formula because it’s painful, that let down pain is normal in the first few weeks and isn’t a sign that you’re ’doing it wrong’. Maybe 97% of women are physically able to breastfeed, but the amount of women doing so who want to but think they can’t, would be a lot higher if we reframed it to incorporate the babies role in breastfeeding too.

I lost a bit of blood and couldn’t have the full golden out with my daughter. She fed every 30 mins day and night for the whole fourth trimester, I believe she had an undiagnosed tongue tie, took three or four weeks to stop supplementing with formula and about 6 weeks to stop the painful latch. The only reason I persevered was guilt and shame about ‘not being able to do it because it should come naturally’ - it was such a strain on me mentally but I ended up breastfeding her for 18 months and loved it.

My son was completely different. No complications, lovely relaxed birth. latched straight away, no latch pain, just letdown pain initially.

its the babies not the mums I’m sure of it

Mothers through the ages have cooked from scratch whilst not having washing machines and other electrical devices.

I work full time and trust me cooking from scratch is a gazillion times easier than breast feeding even when I was on maternity leave.

Funny how those pushing breast feeding onto others don’t like it when other parenting choices (that are far more important) are pushed on to them. Can’t wait to hear the excuse for children having any screens at all. We know the huge damage screens do, no child or teen should be given them. They cause far more problems to health and life than not breast feeding.

If anyone reading this is interested in breastfeeding support, this is an excellent organisation who can help.

momab.org.uk/

Do you bake your own bread on a near daily basis too? Because homemade gluten free bread is only good on the day its made really so I'd have to fit in working full time (out of the house 10/11 hours a day), cooking dinner and prepping my lunches, doing laundry, taking my children to their extra curriculars, spending time with them, and still find a couple of hours every day or two to bake bread. I'm afraid there isn't enough hours in the day, I need to rest and relax too.

Look you can either keep going with this and look a little silly in the process, or employ your logical thinking skills and realise you’re conflicting 2 debates where one has no bearing on the other.

Breastfeeding is better for babies and healthier for the mothers, end of. This isn’t up for debate, it’s a fact, and I say this as somebody who bottle fed my first after 5 months. Whatever you eat thereafter is a separate and equally as important matter, but your nonsense binary of ‘well if you don’t churn your own butter you may as well have never breastfed either’ is very silly indeed and reads like you’re a person with big breastfeeding hangups.

You’re also unknowingly defeating your own argument by making out breastfeeding is transient, unimportant yet somehow very energetically and mentally taxing for mothers, yet sourcing food from farm shops and cooking from scratch 3 times a day for 20 years is ‘what you should do as a decent parent’.

I absolutely am not. They are very much related. Breast feeding is over inflated and but one parenting choice in many( and not one worth agonising over either).

I find it shameful the way it is over inflated and how mothers in this country are pressured into it in ways they aren’t with other far more worthy parenting choices.

Maybe if there was less over inflating , scaremongering and more support with mixed feeding the figures would be better. Just a thought.

Yet you’re here ‘pressuring’ women into sourcing an all organic diet at great time and expense by saying the health benefits are justified? Which health benefit from organic food is quantifiably better than the benefits of breastfeeding? You sound like you’re really trying to reassure yourself of something.

I think it’s observational rather than actual research though. Women were perhaps a lot less well fed and many may have been on the cusp of amenorrhea after a pregnancy anyway.

It’s certainly not considered as an effective method of birth control in modern society - in fact you’re warned by health visitors and GPs not to imagine that you’re not at risk of a new pregnancy when you BF.

Personally I didn’t have a period for nearly a year after my first child, but for my subsequent babies, they came back after about 3-5 months. The only explanation I have is that the first baby was a very greedy boy and the others less so. But I’ve no idea if that’s why.

Of course I know it doesn’t apply now - the context of the conversation was the situation historically.

But it it’s actually about food supply then any increase in the woman’s physiological needs would have an equally contraceptive effect: it’s like saying that doing sports acts as a contraceptive because some women find their periods stop. That doesn’t make sport a contraceptive all the same.

I just feel it’s so unrelated to our lives today that it’s almost become an urban myth. Breast feeding is not a reliable contraceptive and women shouldn’t be led to think it might be.

Look, you’re weighing in mid thread without having read the previous relevant messages between me and the poster I was responding to, so you’re getting the wrong end of the stick.

That poster said that historically women had babies every year and that’s why there were loads of wet nurses around. My response was that for 95% of human history the natural spacing for childbirth was 3-4 years because - as you say (and as I said) nutrition standards were different as were feeding patterns. Smaller age gaps (of 1 year or less) didn’t start to exist until breastmilk substitutes started to be used.

Nowadays yes, bf is not recommended as a contraceptive, but that has nothing to do with the point I was making.

Ok fair enough/

I’m not. I’m simply pointing out the hypocrisy. It’s apparently only ok to bully and shame women in to the breast feeding parenting choice and not others- when breast feeding has one of the smallest impacts!

Those pushing breast feeding don’t like it when their choices are questioned! You don’t like others telling you what you can and should be doing when making a choice so who are you to do that to other mothers as regards breast feeding?

So you think infant mortality had nothing to do with the fact that families weren't particularly large on average and that it was all down to breastfeeding.

I think the other poster is talking about gap between pregnancy rather than size of family. Infant mortality has nothing to do with the former - except that you might expect it to shorten the window in some cases as if the baby sadly died very young then there would be no breastfeeding.

No it isn't.

If you even say, "I think women should make an effort to breastfeed," the formula mums age even most of the breastfeeding mums go mad. Even sharing factual information about the benefits of breast milk gets people screaming that they're being "shamed".

It's completely socially acceptable to say that you should make an effort to reduce screentime and give your children a healthy diet.

It's not realistic to say zero screens and zero UPFs for most people because unlike a 6 month old baby, older children have their own interests, wishes and opinions. A newborn baby eats what it's given and doesn't complain, a 7 yo will feel completely left out at school if they can't eat the same food or talk about the same TV shows as any of their friends. You have to exert an unhealthy level of control over a child to prevent them from ever eating UPFs or non-organic food and that doesn't teach them a healthy relationship with food.

What you're saying is that the attitude to encouraging breastfeeding is the same as saying, "You're a bad parent if your children ever have any screentime of UPF food," but I've never seen anyone say, "You're a bad parent if your child ever has a drop of formula, regardless of how many struggles you had with breastfeeding."

Those mothers may have breastfed other babies though.

@Pikachu150 infant mortality would reduce the average natural gaps between pregancies and so bring the average gap down, so given that all the research that has been done on this suggests that average gap is 3-4 years, that would actually imply a longer gap between babies in the absence of infant mortality, not a shorter one as you seem to be arguing (on the basis of no evidence whatsoever).

Your original claim was that women historically had babies every year, and that’s just not the case.

What evidence is there of the average gap in pregnancies and why would infant/child mortality reduce the average gap between pregnancies?

Because they would not be breastfeeding a child, their cycle would come back sooner and they would be able to get pregnant again.

Okay. I perhaps should have said infant and child mortality as I didn't just mean those that were breast fed.