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

Sorry to post so much on this... I feel pretty passionate about the subject! BBWBabeLisa, it is awful you felt so loathe to call a helpline, I felt similar but was in such agony I did get through to a LLL counsellor who got me through one very bad night. But your post partum vulnerability is the norm for many people. There was a woman in my NCT area who committed suicide two weeks after her first child was born - the poor dh didn't even know she was depressed.
I saw a woman in a park once holding a new baby and looking like she was going to die of sorrow. I just went up and gave her the NCT number and urged her to call I hope she did.
We're not meant to have babies in social isolation IMO. All I wanted was my womenfolk around me! The men could go hang just give me my mum and sis and mil at a push.... Do you know Sheila Kitzingers books at all? I wonder if she's out of fashion now. She has a lot to say about all this.

Lisa - I'm sure I read somewhere on here about someone who was expressing colostrum and freezing it prior to her baby being born. I am sure you could do it next time and freeze it in those sterile little pots for cup/bottle feeding in those first few hours after birth. You need to move back to Glasgow and I'll come and visit you

The best BFing advice I have received was on here, I doubt I would have BF DD1 so long if it weren't for all the wonderful advice on here, with DD2 I ignored everyone and was confident enough in myself and my body to just get on with it, I'm sure the MWs thought I was a crazy old bat.

oh god what a poorly written and badly researched article, without any attempt at intelligent analysis. Feminism, my arse.
imo women are badly let down by the prevalent culture, which expects them to brastfed but leaves them alone, vulnerable, without any proper support (professional or - more importantly - social and family) exhausted and often scarred emotionally and physically by a crappy, over medicalised birth and often with the aftereffects of drugs in the mother and the baby - drugs only made necessary by the crappy, over medicalised birth.
the formula companies fill in this horrible yawning gap with their overpriced product. I am not blaming them. I am not blaming the mothers. it isn't a simple issue, and there are no simple solutions but has wider implications for the way we treat mothers and babies.
sorry for the rant but I see this EVERY BLOODY DAY and it gets to me.

harpsi - I totally agree with everything you have said, you just put it better than I ever could.

Re labour and breastfeeding. Once you're in labour you have to go through with it - you have no choice at all. The pain is horrendous but you know it will end in a few hours and you'll have a baby to show for it. When faced with a similar level of pain when breastfeeding, and this goes on for days, weeks, even months, you have no idea when it is going to end. You get to the point where enough is enough, especially if it's harming your relationship with your baby. That is the difference - is that what you were getting at Kittylette?

right on, harpsi.

Harpsi - hear hear.

Coming a bit late to this, but the article was incredibly frustrating, I found. There was, to my horror, a fairly similar one in a highly respected, left-liberal German newspaper last year (would translate it but wouldn't that be breaching copyright?), also written by a mother with negative experience of bf, and headlined 'The Milk Trap' ffs.
FWI I think in a society without a 'bf culture', where social and medical support is lacking and formula is heavily (formally and informally) marketed, some people whose job is to promote bf might worry that it would be counterproductive to discuss the downsides. We had a nightmare first few weeks of bf, starting with extreme pressure to top up in hospital on day 3 when my milk was hardly in, and if I hadn't a) had MN and b) been so bloody-minded about it I might well have given up and not be still bf 20 months down the line.
Beyond medical attitudes of suspicion towards a small, slight (but perfectly healthy) baby and views of formula as a panacea, I haven't encountered negative attitudes towards bf per se, but the longer I have bf, the more often I have been regarded as a superwoman/martyr/earthmother hybrid (and believe me, I am none of the three ). Harpsi is absolutely right that the whole thing is part of a wider context, all aspects of which need to be looked at - better professional support alone, while it would be a start, is only a relatively small part of that.

Ahh I can't stay away. Have hoovered the lounge and hall between posts tho.
SK, be careful what you wish for, if I get pregnant in the next couple of months Andy will be in Iraq when the baby's due so I may well be having it in Glasgow! My mother would love that, but as she's so anti-bf ("the poor wee thing's starving - give her a bottle") I'd really rather not.
Ipanema - being an army wife I'm getting used to not having my family & friends around me, but I insisted on my mother coming down for the birth as I felt I'd need female support, won't be making that mistake again - if need be I'll save up all thru my pregnancy and hire a doula who is pro-bf to be with me. Unfortunately anti-bf family/friends make it all so much harder than it has to be.

How far can you go in hospital when it comes to insisting your baby not be given any formula? Can the doctors over-rule you if they believe it to be in the best interests of the baby? I'd be interested to know what my rights would be. Could the doc call in social services and accuse me of harming the child by refusing to let them top up with formula to raise blood sugar?

Doctors can get court orders if necessary e.g. if a parent says a child is a Jehovah's witness and not allowed a life saving blood transfusion or a parent wants a child to follow a diet which will kill it. I once had a remote tussle with health visitors about vitamins for babies which I wasn't wanting to give and I just sent them some material which proved my point and they gave up.

The author says:

"Room 13 - the area for the classes was their domain and every square inch of the walls was adorned with posters of breasts. Breasts being suckled by beautiful newborns, breasts shown as a cross section so you as the uninitiated mum to be could see where the milk comes from, even breasts out on the beach as a woman posed with her toddler attached to one nipple and her tiny baby to the other".

I could write the exact same thing about the subtle marketing (very unsubtle in some countries) of formula and the fact that I hardly EVER see a breastfed baby, even in the posh quarters of London. Formula feeding is much more pervasive in the public's mind than she would ever dare admit.

I don't think it had much to do with feminisim. It had something to do with hospitals being the place to pick up infections (and try to give birth at home if you can) and pressure from a husband to move to bottle feeding.

Also is it actually true that antibiotics affect your breast milk? My babies never objected.

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i have really skimmed this thread so apologies for going off on a tangent.

when you need the support face to face to carry on bf it's usually the wee hours of the morning when there's no bugger to help

actually if it weren't for the support given by some of you on MN, I think I would have given up bf. so thanks.

BabeLisa - that is a very good qusetion. My understanding of the law of consent with respect to medical matters, is that the parents of the child (if the child is not old enough or does not have the full capcity to consent) MUST consent to any medical treatment. Is formula medical treatment though ? I guess the answer is yes if it was necessary for the child to survive.

HOWEVER, in cases of emergency there may not be sufficient time to require consent, so this is where it all goes pear shaped as this is where the medical prof. can step in and say "well, it was an emergency/and or immediate medical decision needed to be made and we had to do it, bla....bla..". The reality is (and this happens with some c-sections - it happened with my own sister's c-section) is that sometimes the medical prof. in order not to get caught up in litigation, will class something as an emergency and thereby may over-rule your wishes.

I had a very long birth plan (luckily I gave birth in a birth centre which thankfully deliberately lacks high tech medical gadgets and fancy doctors). If my baby had been admin. with formula for a totally useless excuse ("baby was hungry and you were too tired to wake up love") against my wishes, I would have sued my NHS Trust. That is how strongly I feel about it.

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yr, yes but if the parents don't consent then it goes to court. It happened with those doctors who wanted to turn off life support and the parents didn't agree and cases where religion or weird diets etc are killing a child. Then there's the interesting issue of whether you can fly your child abroad so it's outside the reach of the UK medical authorities. Very interesting issues. When you're pregnant and giving birth though you consent to what is done to your body (and child I believe before it is born) just like we all have rights to enganger our lives, go hand gliding or even commit suicide or choose to cut off our leg etc although then you get into mental health issues.

I think one case of a woman in labour the doctors were trying to say to the judge this woman cannot make decisions she's having contractions and the court said - yes she can. That must have been just before I had my twins because I remember whilst in labour how comforting that decision was to me not that I ended up with any issues between doctors and me over the labour in the end.

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I have not read all of the responses to the article, but my first thoughts after reading the article were: 1- why has she already decided not to even try to BF her next child when she seemed to conclude that many of her BF problems were related to the drugs she was prescribed and 2 ? do sterilizers and formula not come with very specific instructions?..

I think that a lot of what she experienced was fairly typical ? MW and HV who assume you will BF but can?t really support you if you do have some problems.

I had very a very similar experience with BF to another post (think it was joolsand oliver) and only continued to BF through sheer bloodymindedness. I have told any friends who are pregnant to be realistic and that BF can be very hard and that I?ve never shed as many tears in my whole life as I did the first few weeks but that I felt that overall it was worth it. One of my friends mentioned what I had told her in her antenatal class and it was totally dismissed by the MW. My friend then went on to have a very hard time with BF but is still going at 5 months.

Some people do have a great experience of BF and they are very lucky, some people have a really hard time but keep going, others have a hard time and give up, others decide to give up and some people don?t even try, but that?s life isn?t it?

It BF is a feminist issue then surely the fundamental point of feminism is for women to have choice, for example to be able to CHOOSE whether to get married, to CHOOSE whether to have a baby and then to CHOOSE whether or not to bf.

aaah yes, but you are making the first two choices for yourself, are you not?

Wow long long thread and v interesting, I thought article was one sided . her experience sounds awful but I did think she showed herself to be ignorant with her comments about the health service giving her antibiotics for an operation, would she rather they had sent her out of a sterile environment without them?

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But Pitchounette, what you don't have the right to do, is claim that there's no difference and that the benefits of breastfeeding are negligible.

Which is what the article implies, imo.

I suppose you do have a right to express those views because we have freedom of speech may be depending on where and how it's written. Claim on a milk jar - bottle feeding is best, not allowed. Someone's blog probably is. Blog secretly financially supported by Nestle if that were so probably not.