Another article about how awful breastfeeding is, this time in a feminist publication

[Caligula]

I thought some of you would like to read this.

This misinformation bugged me:

"Times change though, and the formulas on the market are hopefully as close to what comes out of your boob, as they will ever be".

Wonder what the rest of you think

the new breastfeeding taboo

It's not just bullying and intimidation, it's stupid bullying and intimidation.

If babies need 150 ml/kg/day of milk on day 2 in order to survive, how on earth has the human race got this far on just colostrum???

have only just seen this thread and have skimmed it, but would like to praise my local nhs services (yes i know that may sound strange). in the hospital i was supported really well by the mws, also by the community mw and subsequently by the local hv. i love bf and have got to 6 months and am hoping to carry on. most of my friends in other areas seem to have been encouraged to swap to ff at 6m, but it's the opp here - why change if it's going well is the advice given. i know i've been really lucky as i've never had any problems and i really sympathise with people who want to but can't.

DD was born just before Christmas and all the other mums who gave birth on the same day were getting out on Christmas. DD kept falling asleep on the breast and lost slightly more than the 10% of birth weight. (She was 7lbs9). I was told I would have to give her a formula top up by the most bismish young doctor (female) and that I wouldn't get home that day. My husband had already driven the hour and a half in the beginning snow to get there. I, of course, was crying when Happy Santa came round with presents...
She was still a good weight, and had only lost 12.5 % of birth weight. It took a couple of observations by my DH to work out that DD was just too damn hot and snuggily to feed. He put drips of water on her back, held a coldish banana to her skin and for the first time she started sucking properly. A midwife came and witnessed the good feeding, hurray!! And yet not hurray because bism doctor came round to say that I absolutely wouldn't be going home today. The midwife said to us after that we were obviously sensible parents and that people get too hung up on the magic 10%, and advised us to do what we had suggested and sign ourselves out.
Happy mummy, happy daddy, happy feeding baby, happy Christmas. And no top up formula.

calm - what a lovely story - I wish DH and I had known about cold bananas (ok, not what you are thinking, ok ?) because DS was born 17 days early in the middle of a very hot June and wouldn't latch or suck for the first 4 days after birth. Poor baby, I was lucky he only lost 10% and didn't get dehydrated. No formula, he just started latching when my milk came in on day 4.

I keep saying this and I know it's difficult in the real world, but everyone who has had an experience like Calm's in hospital, should complain about it, in writing, with WHO guidelines enclosed so that the ignorant git who reads the complaint gets educated.

This sort of thing will not change until hospitals start to get as much negative feedback as we are getting piss-poor advice.

Meant to say, even if it's a whole year or two later that you complain (because no-one's going to have the time or energy to after just having a baby), I think it's still worth it.

Nothing's ever going to change unless we make it.

I agree but the number of ignorant gits re. bf is in their thousands. Do you think the best way to educate them is to write in and complain, when we all know it will just get shoved into some drawer and ignored, or perhaps do some serious lobbying ? As usual I am very cynical and think letter writing is futile, even more so because I have first hand experience of how the NHS works (or doesn't work) - they basically can't be arsed with bf.

I think we need to do both. The problem with groups like the NCT is that they can ignore them and pretend that they are some kind of marginal breastfeeding fanatics.

Whereas thousands of ordinary women...

oh Caligula - go on lass you are such a revolutionary - I wish I was as positive as you on this one !

yesyesyesyesyes it is worth writing.
every time.

right then - the first on my hate mail list is my ex-GP (a female), then my ex-HV (a total moron), then a couple of mw's, then Tony Blair himself, that git !

as the saying goes:
"for bad stuff to happen, all it takes is for good women to do f all."
I may be paraphrasing

Re breastfeeding and feminism though, I don't think I have ever come across any convincing link of the two. Once, in a bookshop I idly looked up breastfeeding in the index of the latest Germaine Greer (forget the title but it was about 10 years ago) and found a short paragraph about a woman who felt compelled to give up bf out of guilt because she enjoyed it too much.

I thought she was silly to write about something of which she had no experience. But which famous feminists have experienced bf? Not Andrea Dworkin, not Simone de Beauvoir (I think). Great women writers and thinkers of the past don't seem to have experienced it: Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen were nuns; Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and George Eliot were all childless. Mrs Gaskell had children but I don't remember anything about bf in her novels. Did Emmeline Pankhurst have any thoughts? Her feminist credentials and experience of motherhood would give her opinions some clout.

Agree with Elasticwoman - I was given vitamin drops and iron drops for dd when she was 5 days old from the hospital! I never gave them to her - why are we told that breast milk has all the nutrients a baby needs from birth and yet we have to give supplements? Totally ridiculous. Having said that though, the hospital were incredibly supportive with me bf and staff were never too busy to help me with it (I was in for 10 days after early birth and C-section). I can't praise them highly enough, but if they could do it then why can't others? The weird thing re. the people staring when I was bfing was that my dd is only 7 months old, and very little. It's not like she's 2 and a huge size which admittedly I would expect stares at.

I have heard recently of a mother who was told to put her baby onto formula because her baby had a cold and wasn't bfeeding well (I know this to be true - I'm just being vague on purpose).

Something needs to be done.

I'm becoming more and more in favour of violence, but I have a sneaking suspicion it's not necessarily the way forward...

I just want to bite and kick people who are so fecking ignorant about bfeeding and should be supporting women to do it.

The fuckers.

So, what can we do?

Elastic woman - you are right there is a dearth of feminists writing about bf which I find quite puzzling because I regard it as a key feature of a woman's biology, like childbirth. I referred further down to Gabriel Palmer's 'The Politics of Breastfeeding'. I think it is very much a woman empowerment book, whether feminist or not. Palmer may not call herself a feminist, I don't know, I would like to know whether she considers herself one. The book makes no referenace to a particular political stance.

One of her most powerful arguments is that women have had their biological power to nurture a child taken away through the decline in bf - quite often because mum and baby are and have been separated and encouraged to separate from birth. Then there is the gradual encroachment of formula leading to a decline in bf (in collusion with so called health profs. many of whom are pretty much bribed into pushing formula in the world's poorest countries).

I find the book deeply disturbing and a very emotional read, I have found myself crying when reading parts of it.

Palmer admits to formula feeding her first child and being upset about it years later. She addresses the issue of why many women who can not or do not bf feel guilty even many many years later.

I'm afraid I haven't read all the responses, but I have read the article and just want to say - THANK YOU for posting it!

My DS is 19 weeks and I absolutely adore him, but I my enjoyment has been marred by my feelings of guilt and failure! At 11 weeks he had only put on 2lbs and 2ozs in weight, he vomited after every feed, was constantly hungry and writhing in discomfort. As a last resort and only when it was prescribed by the paediatrician did I top him up with formula. With only 2 top ups a day, he put on 1lb and 2ozs in a week, he vomited a little less and was happier. I didn't think it could be the formula, but I perservered with little top ups and he slowly gained weight, but the vomiting, wetting through constantly and discomfort persisted. Eventually at 16 weeks, I tried a trial of 2 days of just formula (while I pumped). He was transformed - happy, putting on weight, not being so sick, not wetting through as much. I have still struggled with not wanting to give up bf, but I have to do what seems to make my DS happiest and my milk is also starting to dry up. I could spend the next two weeks trying to regenerate my supply, constantly feeding, pumping and have a miserable baby, or I could just enjoy my time with him. But I have battled with it. So thank you for providing me with a point of view that reassures me that I am not a failure as a Mum for doing so.

I do agree that there is help out there, I went to the BF Clinic many times, but they always said he was latching on fine, "all babies posset" and that I shouldn't be obsessed with weight gain - but what am I to do when the Doc and HVs are worried about it? He did look quite skeletal at 11 weeks!

Mind you, I could continue to think that I am a failure if I continue to go into dept store parents rooms! Just imagine, at 11 weeks, me desperately trying to feed him up so he wouldn't be taken back into hospital (having already spent a week there), finish bfing and go to top him up in bottle feeding area - a Mum is sitting there breast feeding and as I am giving DS bottle I hear her saying to her baby "Ooh, why would you want that yucky stuff, when you have this lovely stuff on tap"? Firstly, she doesn't know me - how does she know I haven't had a mastectomy and can't feed; secondly, if she feels so strongly, she should be sitting in the bfing area; finally, she obviously didn't know I was an extremely worried Mum trying to do the best for her baby. If I had felt strong enough, I would have said something, but I was focussing all my efforts on my baby.

I appreciate that breast is best, I know it's advantages, I appreciate all the help out there, but PLEASE, please, don't judge other Mums for bottle feeding, when you don't have a clue what they have gone through - just as no-one would judge a Mum by the nappies they use, please don't judge by the food they choose. And, by all means, put all the information in the world out there about bfing, but please allow others to put information out reassuring Mums that they are not a failure if they bottle feed (for whatever reason). Its great that there is so much information and support out there these days, but please, lets just all get on with enjoying motherhood,
THANK YOU!

Ah yes,Yellowrose.
This book rates amongst my top five reads ever.
Fantastically powerful read.
Changed my views completely on seeing bfing as merely a personal feeding choice to grasping the wider political,sociological,psychological and ecological issues.

Wot Juingle?
Someone actually said to their baby 'Why would you want that yucky stuff while this is on tap?' or is this an imagined scenario??

oh good moondog - glad you are a fan too

jingle - no one is actually saying anything negative about bottle feeders here are they ? if a mum (any mum i don't care whether bf or ff) had a made a comment like that to me, i would have knocked her out, failing that would have said something so rude back that she would have never recovered from the insult !

you would be surprised about the amount of idiocy that bf mums (esp. those feeding toddlers) have to face every day. be happy that we are ALL judged, no matter what nappies we use (I use Tesco's by the way, cheap and excellent quality) or how we feed

I said a little while ago that we ought to have a link to breastfeeding myths.

I now think that I wasn't thinking big enough.

What we need is a book. "What To Do When It All Goes Tits Up: The Mumsnet Guide To Breastfeeding".

Written by us with all our stories. Although large swathes of it would have to be written by Hunker because she has such a brilliant turn of phrase (cf. her post a few days ago on what to say to a pregnant woman).

I'm serious, by the way. Haven't time for any more now as I'm in an opposite time zone and dd1 is trashing the house and dd2 is hollering for a feed.

Back soon later, as dd1 would say....

re: 'we are all judged...'

for the zillionth time, bfers being judged at least have the comfort of knowing that they are providing the best nourishment for their child.
ffers know that they aren't. that is why the two situations are not the same.