I have avoided posting here, but .... I have to pick up on the truly awful car seat analogy.
This is a well-known analogy in the US lactation consultant world, but it is not used with mothers, for heaven's sake.
It is mainly used to explain to healthcare professionals that they are under an obligation to inform mothers of the health risks of using formula.
Often, in the US as well as the UK, healthcare professionals who advise parents to be about feeding methods give the impression that it is a lifestyle choice pure and simple, and that neither method has any real measurable effect. The thinking behind this is that they don't want to make mothers who don't breastfeed feel guilty. The car seat analogy is used with HCPs to point up that they give the information about car seats without worrying about the guilt of those parents who don't use car seats, and they don't think of car seats as a life style choice.
It is an utterly crap argument to use for mothers, and a very insulting and cruel one - feeding is of course not a lifestyle choice, and many mothers have deep seated reasons why they don't breastfeed which are their business. Others try to breastfeed and it doesn't work out. Formula feeding's risks are usually not as dramatic as sudden death or severe injury on the roads, and use or not of a car seat has nothing to do with people's feelings about their bodies, or whether they were supported properly when learning to fit the car seat
No wonder people felt angry when zebra came out with the analogy. I was just as angry.
However, giving women the right information is crucial. When it was discovered that placing babies on their backs offered significant protection against cot death, we didn't worry about mothers of SIDS babies who put their babies on their fronts feeling guilty - although of course many of them did, even though they were only acting on the information they got at the time.
It was considered more important to inform all mothers from now on about the known, safer way of lying their babies to sleep.
Similarly withthe known risk of sleeping with your baby on a sofa - do we say 'don't tell us about that because some of us actually find it convenient to sleep on a sofa'. No we don't. We want the information to allow us to make changes and choices.
The fact is that while the choice to breastfeed and put it into practice is not as simple as the choice not to sleep on a sofa, the information, for some people at least, is as important. The post on the other thread from the mum now worried about the risks of her formula fed baby developing diabetes is a case in point. She should have been told, as everyone should be, and she should have been especially told as her dh has diabetes - but yet again, posters have castigated people who shared that information, because it scared her.
The lack of support in this country for people who want to bf is a scandal. It is no good telling people the information they need about the risks of formula and then making it hard for them to breastfeed - that is very cruel. Information should not be withheld, and support should be there for everyone.
Those mothers who do not wish to breastfeed, or who switch from breastfeeding to formula, should be supported to, without anyone making any remarks about their parenting, or even thinking the remarks....and certainly without ill-thought out and actually quite hurtful analogies with car seats.