Why do medics pressurise women into bottle-feeding their babies after 12 hours?

[MrsThierryHenry]

Look at this story about what happened to newborns during the Mexico City earthquake in 1985:

"However, the most memorable story to come from this event was the rescue of nearly all the newborn babies that were in the nursery at the time. Like Juana Jazmin Arias Aguilera, these babies were pulled out of the wreckage mostly unscathed but lost their mothers.[ These babies were found seven days after the initial event and came to be known as the ?Miracle Babies? or the ?Miracle of Hospital Juarez? . The reason for this was that these babies survived without nourishment, water, warmth or human contact for all that time."

I remember my Mexican pregnancy yoga instructor telling us this, so I searched and found the above quote on Wikipedia. More here. Scroll down to the 'Hospital Juarez' bit.

If those babies could survive for 7 days on their fat reserves (apparently that's what kept them going), and this has been known for almost 25 years, what are our midwives playing at? Is there a midwife on MN who can explain?

Paranoia about something going wrong?
Thinking in reactive shirt term manner rather than longterm one (I work for NHS and this sort of thinking is pervasive. Everyone just watching their own back.)

You're probably right, moondog, and I bet the '12 hour' limit is just a random number plucked from the sky.

i had pretty dire ante-natal care after ds1, but I can say that I had no pressure to bottle feed after 12 hours.

he was a breast refuser but they told me he was fine for 24 hours.
they checked his blood glucose levels, and he eventually went another day without having anything.

then he was given some expressed colostrum, and some formula (which in hindsight I wish I'd refused, but that's another story altogether)

have not come across anyone being pressurised to feed after 12 hours

After DS2 was born at about 3pm he promptly went to sleep - until past 1pm the following day, as I recall. I kept on having to LIE to everyone about him having woken up and fed after the first: "You're going to have to wake him up to feed him or we'll have to see about giving him something," WTF! He was a chubby little fella and definitely was in no great need of immediate nourishment. I was just glad he was my second, not my first.