Bottle feeding mum asked to leave breast feeding cafe

[Dawnybabe]

In my local paper, the Eastern Daily Press, of Norfolk, they ran a story about a mum who had, through a friend, been asked by a member of staff at a PCT run breast feeding cafe not to return because she had bottle fed her four month old son. Please tell me I'm not the only one absolutely incandescant with rage over this? Apparently she had a medical reason for bottle feeding as well. Aren't the staff being as bigoted as the general public who force the need for a breast feeding cafe in the first place? Surely the attitude should be that you are safe to feed there however you like without any prejudice? There is enough pressure and guilt forced on bottle feeding mums as it is without staff who should know better joining in the witch hunt.

hey! weeonion that is fucking fantastic! well done, bloody hell i remember you posting how hard it all was in the beginning. that is brilliant news, i'm so pleased for you, well done. rosemary is a bit great isn't she?

did you see the irish woman in the PRM? or what was the other one called? mary? they were nice i thought but basically pretty useless. i've had words with the man who runs that hospital and all maternity services for greater glasgow(who i actually rather adore), he just doesn't 'get' the emotional pull of bfing because his children were ffed after his wife broke her heart about it and gave up. so he saw it as a real saviour

he's in charge of mat services so bfing is a bit out of his remit as it's post-baby but he's the head of the hosp i think. i intend to continue to have words with him, however, until things improve. we shall overcome.

siobhan, that was it. nice, but not any use to me.

I know it's moved on a bit from there but I thought I'd post the cafe's response to the article. Couldn't see it online so I've typed it up, probably loads of typos.

Café denies making mother unwelcome

Breastfeeding volunteers said last night they did not tell a bottle-feeding mother she was unwelcome at their drop in café and insisted they were not discriminatory. Eileen Herbert, volunteer lactation consultant at Attleborough Breastfeeding café (ABC) said she felt sorry for the mother in her distress but nothing had been said or done to make the woman feel unwelcome.
Her comments came after a story in yesterday?s EDP in which the woman?s friend, another mother, claimed she had been told bottle feeding was not appropriate at the café and was advised not to return.
Ms Herbert said the pair had approached and spoken to a trained breastfeeding supporter who had explained the ethos of the café, which is to provide a meeting place on a weekly basis to support, help and advise mothers who are breastfeeding.
She said: ?Both the mother who was bottle feeding and her friend were made welcome and given refreshments. We would never turn anyone away but if a mother were to come here on her own bottle feeding, it might be a bit embarrassing for her.?

a random thought --- what about a mother giving EBM? would they be turned away?

I know this sounds cynical but was the mother in the story making a point? I haven't read the whole thread so perhaps this has been raised already.

the first article is linked further down, nkf. i don't think there was a point as such, it's a local paper so maybe she or someone close to her rang up or maybe someone just heard her moaning about it and thought 'there's a raggy Daily Mail-esque story there...'

I keep wondering what tiktok would do, does anyone know where she is? i bet that she wouldn't say the word 'embarrassed' out loud wrt a mum ffing, that's for sure.

the two stories seem in rank opposition. did her friend imagine it? if the ethos was explained by the woman who used the word embarrassed, i can see why people might have got upset.

My DD was in hospital for 2 weeks when she was born and started on bottles of formula milk. We re-established breastfeeding but it took a few weeks. I was attending BF cafes with bottle of milk nearby. DD was asleep all the time and I couldn't wake her up for these specific sessions to get help with positioning etc. I may well have looked like a fraudster. (Long way to travel though for a cheap cup of coffee.)

Perhaps I should mention BF re-established successfully and kept going till 2 years. I think being made to feel welcome at the BF cafe played a role.

Okay, Aitch. I've just read it and she wasn't thrown out or asked to leave by the sounds of it. Nor was it a cafe.

Moving slightly off at a tangent, I don't see how health professionals can get the fact across that breast is best for baby without making those who can't breastfeed feel bad. And whether those hurt feelings are the fault of the health professionals.

she was told via her friend not to return, according to the first piece at any rate. according to the bfc the whole thing's a fabrication, although this does beg the question as to why the woman would make something like that up. but then the bfc thinks that it's sensitive to say that ffing in a bfing support group is embarrassing.

i do understand and have always understood that it's not a cafe, by the way, i'm not dense. I've been to these sorts of things, albeit run by better bfcs by the looks of things.

my point is that being sniffy enough to ask her not to return to a support group with her friend (who she may have been a supporter of) in future was Not Good. they should just have let it dawn on her, which i'm quite sure it would have. the coffee's not that good to want to havng around somewhere she's not welcome, i'll bet.

my feelings are not hurt by the thought that 'breast is best' by the way. they never were. it's not a slogan, it's simply A Fact.
i agonised over the fact that i couldn't BF exclusively, and that i was giving my dd second-best, there wasn't a thing a health professional could have said to make that different. they did try, by the way, lots of 'no one could've tried harder etc etc' but who cares? formula isn't as good, it just isn't. but not being able to bf is hardly a reason to treat someone like a pariah and judging by the mere existence of the first story that is how the woman herself feels she has been treated.
as i say, be welcoming and leave the elephant in the room well alone and she'd have been gone in a fortnight.

But is it not the case that many ff mothers do feel embarrassed at bottle feeding whilst surrounded by breastfeeding mothers? It's something that's certainly cropped up on Mumsnet before. I remember a story once about how a ff-ing mother felt she had to pretend to bf her baby in a Starbucks (I think!) because either she was with bf-ing mothers or there were a couple nearby. It was used as a quote in some bf-ing story in the press IIRC. In fact I was in a situation once when I was bf-ing BabyDragon and another mother felt the need to explain to me in great depth why she'd not managed to bf her baby. I'd not said anything nor had I looked askance at her or anything and it came across as she felt the need to justify the bottle she was giving her baby because she was embarrassed to be doing so.

totally agree, soupy, it is mortifying. that's why i think that there was no need to give her any encouragement not to come again.

i also agree with whoever posted that the 'cafe' is misleading. i've never heard of them until MN as i'm not aware of them being a big thign where we live, we just call them bfing support groups.

but i do remember thinking 'a cafe? surely you can just bf in any cafe?' so it may be that which caused confusion, who knows? or her pal might have said 'i want to see a woman at this place about my latch, they serve coffee, wanna come?' who knows?

but it would have been very apparent to her that she wasn't welcome in future without them saying anything, i'm sure. even when they made me and twofalls Very Welcome indeed we still didn't go back to ours.

But according to the BFC they didn't make her unwelcome or ask her to leave. The whole story is very much a case of picking which side you believe. Chances are it was a misunderstanding.

blimey!!!to OP medical reason or not it is no one else business how an adult mum choses to feed her baby, stories like this are so sad and divisive. after all we are all mums

that's true, according to the second story none of it happened. but the bfc does say that they tried to explain the ethos of the cafe to her so at the very least they clearly handled that badly. tbh, the fact that she said that ff mums would be 'embarrassed' to a journo is dense of her and suggests that she isn't particularly sensitive to the issues.

I did think that line was an odd thing to say, almost undid everything she'd said previously, but we can only speculate about whether she was insensitive, similarly whether they were over sensitive.

Before comdeming that nasty breastfeeding cafe, we really need to know their side of the story.

I went to a breastfeeding drop in once which was held in the local hospital. My son was three months at the time and was having an ultrasound and seeing the paediatrian. I used the breastfeeding drop in as a discrete place to breastfeed my baby.

I had no breastfeeding problems. I felt really embrassed when they started offering me free biscuits and tea. None of the midwives or breastfeeding councellors minded me being there. However I felt a more appriopate place for me was La Leche League meetings.

The idea of a group of mums meeting in a place like that after a baby massage class is taking the piss. I think that the organisers are perfectly within their rights to ask them to find a proper cafe.

It is just like the special needs playgroup or baby gym. Its a support group.

have you read their side of the story, frances?
and you really, really, really don't know that anyone was taking the piss. that's pure speculation on your part.

I put their response a few posts back at 14.27, but it has been difficult to get a true picture, partly because of poor reporting especially in the initial story.

i'm much less interested in this particular story than i am in the MNers who think that telling a ffer not to return to a bfing support group is necessary and appropriate. the newspaper story has rather ceased to be the issue imo. am so glad that my own bfcs were more enlightened.

yes, sorry, I realised it had moved on I just thought it would be interesting to see what they said in response.

no no, i wasn't directing that at you but at frances. i was interested to see the follow-up cos it was utterly contradictory but like you i thought that the positives were outdone by the 'embarrassed' thing. of course everyone knows that's true, but saying it out loud... hmmm.

i am trying to think WWTTD (what would tiktok do?) i'm sure she would have been able to phrase 'please fuck off and don't come back' sensitively. even hunker would've...

although. what do you think about this?

yesterday i was walking past our next-door-neighbour's front steps and there was a woman and her baby sitting on it. i was trying to hurry dd up and was saying 'look, there's a baby, dd, come on'. so we got to the steps and it was a child older than dd, and the woman was bfing as it turns out.

so i said 'that's not a baby, that's a big girl', because that's a thing i say to dd when she misidentifies big kids as babies (she can only say babies). but then i thought 'shit! i hope that woman doesn't think i'm saying that the kid is too old to be bfd', cos in truth i'd said it before i'd even noticed the bfing.

and THEN, because i was feeling a bit self-conscious by this stage i tried to keep talking to her in case she thought i was a ffing horror-bitch, said 'if you're looking for some privacy, not that i think you should be i hasten to add, i could let you into our hallway (it's shared in the flat) and you could give her a feed there and let yourself out.

but she said, of course, 'ur, no i'm fine' and i felt like a total plonker for having offered... so i am aware that it's not always easy to express yourself in the right way about this.

but i think that a bfc should be better than i am, and that they should have policies in place wrt to visiting ffers.

Aitch, its speculation on everyone's part on both sides here, surely?

Anyway, I think you should step away from this thread, and go add your name to the MN xmas meet up list

Go on, away with you