So Bluemilk pointed to this incendiary article by Hanna Rosin. Lots of people have responded to the substance of the article, and the fudging of the medical literature. The bit I’m fascinated by are comments like these on BlogHer. There are lots of things that can be hard in a baby’s first year of life. Breastfeeding is a learned skill and it can certainly be tricky to get the hang of, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, or that grabbing a bottle is the obvious solution. Commenters cite their baby’s ‘allergy’ to breastmilk, their baby’s weightloss (it’s normal for babies to lose weight after birth, they regain it, not necessarily according to a chart), their ‘lack of milk’, their post-natal depression, their return to work at 6 weeks post-partum, their struggles with normal and common breastfeeding issues (like attachment). They switched to a bottle of formula and the problems lessened or ended, so, they reason, the bottle was the solution. There’s a lot of talk about individual choice in these discussions.
Sometimes the bottle is a solution. Sometimes when you’ve got a 5 week old baby and you have to go back to work next week and breastfeeding and pumping isn’t working, and there’s no one to call who’ll come and help you to get it working, reaching for a tin of formula is a reasonable solution to your circumstances right now.
It isn’t a solution to the problem for all women, for our society, and we shouldn’t accept it as such. A woman who has to go back to work at six weeks or not at all doesn’t have a “choice”, she’s operating in a society that wants her to bottle-feed or live in poverty (or both, or “marry well”). The systemic solution isn’t for all such mothers to grab a bottle, it’s to provide financial support for mothers of infants so they don’t have to rush back to work quite so soon. Breastfeeding isn’t the problem, the lack of maternity leave, and family-unfriendly workplaces, are.
A woman who can’t access knowledgeable supporters when she struggles with attachment in the first few weeks doesn’t have a choice, she’s being neglected and bullied into bottle feeding. A woman who takes her baby to a doctor, a person who is supposed to understand baby development, and they tell her that her perfectly normal baby isn’t gaining weight fast enough and that the solution is formula, doesn’t have much of a choice, she’s being bullied. A woman who has suffered post-natal depression while struggling to breastfeed her first child without support, and is then advised to bottle-feed the second child, isn’t being liberated. She’s being dudded. The key phrase in the problem isn’t “breastfeeding” it’s “without support”. There are lots of women who are conned into framing their individual breastfeeding/bottle feeding dilemma as a matter of personal choice or personal circumstances. It isn’t. Babycare happens within a society that is structured to make some options easier than others, a society that makes some “choices” nigh on compulsory. The problem isn’t breastfeeding, it’s a lack of accessible professional and social support.
Which is why the discussion around whether or not bottle-feeding mothers “should” feel guilty is stupid. Guilt is pointless when you’re doing your best to muddle through a broken system. Anger at the stupid system, on the other hand, is entirely justified, no matter what you fed your baby.
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March 24, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Rebekka
“Anger at the stupid system, on the other hand, is entirely justified”
Couldn’t agree more. That’s patriarchy for you. Always pitting women against of each other instead of against the system.
March 24, 2009 at 3:28 pm
froginthepond
Right on.
(I gave myself a two word limit because otherwise I’d take over your comment box and blog).
Breaking my rule to say that I think all maternal and child health nurses should be certified feminists. I was going to include midwives and lactation consultants but I think they already are. Certified feminists, that is.
March 24, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Stomper Girl
Possibly because I live in inner-city Melbourne and had my child at the Womens Hospital I felt very well supported in learning to breastfeed my baby. I went to breastfeeding school when I couldn’t get the attachment right on my own at home, where they gave me lunch and advice and support. I read literature like Robyn Barker and Kaz Cooke and I was able to approach the MCHC nurse when issues arose. Once I learned how to do it properly breastfeeding was a happy and fulfilling way to feed both my children. So I agree with your argument, you CAN support women to learn this supposedly natural task and it is a crying shame that this service is not available to everyone.
March 25, 2009 at 2:59 pm
sooz
Fark, this is all so overwhelmingly counterproductive (not you dear, just this kind of debate). I find myself wanting to take issue with minor points of fact in the article – particularly the issue of time. Bottle feeding takes just as long as breastfeeding! Plus you have to buy the formula, make them up, sterilise them…
But that’s not the point.
Are some people pressured to breastfeed? for sure.
Are some people discouraged from breast feeding? for sure.
Can everyone agree on how long you should breastfeed for, or when to start solids…NO!
It continues to frustrate me that our biggest problem is that we ask the wrong questions, not that we get the wrong answers. What is ‘best’ in this kind of totalising supposedly objective way is just a dumb question. Are people well informed and able to choose is a much better question. And one we can do a lot more to address than trying to poke holes in each other’s arguments.
March 25, 2009 at 3:15 pm
innercitygarden
Sooz, you’re right, what I was trying to get at, and which you’ve put more succintly is “we ask the same old pointless questions instead of asking useful ones”, we worry too much about trying to make everyone else do what we did (because if they do it too it means I was right and Mother of the Year!) instead of supporting them to do stuff their own way.
I reckon, at least in the first four or five months, I breastfed for much longer periods of time than her estimates. There were certainly weeks where I breastfed for 12 hours a day (I kept wondering why I hadn’t been able to get the dinner on or hang the washing out, then I started keeping track and figured it out). It does take a lot of time. So does bottle feeding, and cuddling, and replacing lost dummies, and singing and rocking and all the stuff non-breastfeeding mothers do to feed and settle their babies. Babies take lots of time, no matter what they’re fed. Which is why all mothers need financial and social support, and time off work without worrying they’ll never get another job.
While I was doing all that breastfeeding I had a mother who lived near by and was retired who came and did the dishes and hung out loads of laundry. Not everyone has someone who can come and do those things, but they should. We really should have better systems for supporting each other, not just when we have babies, but when we get sick, and old and frail too.
March 25, 2009 at 3:35 pm
kel
yes, yes, yes, yes , yes. and ‘they’ reckon conspiracy theory is dead!
March 25, 2009 at 3:44 pm
froginthepond
Ironically, one of the best skills I ever learned as a first-time mum was lying to my MCHC nurse. Not one of the best you could ever come across, she was always concerned about getting it right before worrying about the state of the mother. After difficulties feeding, and coming up with breast supplemented by bottle, I started getting in trouble for giving my lad too much formula!
So, I lied about how much formula he was getting (lots! supply was low and the lad was very very hungry) and then lied about when I started solids and how much (five months, rice cereal and fruit because he liked it and he was really really hungry). Because it was easier that way. I wasn’t told off or judged or made to feel like an inadequate mother. Mind you, the lad was healthy, gaining weight like you wouldn’t believe and stretching out like I still don’t believe.
I changed nurses next time round and didn’t have to lie. And got more breastfeeding support because I knew where it was and how to ask for it and insist on it.
March 25, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Zoe
froginthepond beat me to it – I just couldn’t help going “right on!” at your last par in particular.
But you are! It is ! Right on, sisters!
March 27, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Ariane
Hey, I lied to people too. 1st kid started solids really early. Although sometimes I went out of my way to tell them when he started just to create a reaction.
You are so right about everyone wanting other people to do what they did. I feel the urge to want it too. The only reason it is kept in any check at all (and I’m not saying I control it completely, or even particularly well) is that I did some things so completely differently with each kid. They all started solids at completely different ages, and one wasn’t breastfed anywhere near as long as the others.
And choice is only choice when it is informed and without coercion. At the moment we have an awesome situation in which women are abandoned to raise their babies alone (in every aspect, not just feeding), expected to not bother the working world with it, expected to support themselves financially while they’re at it, and made to feel guilty if they don’t meet some arbitrary standard (often set by women themselves).
So yes, I probably could have said that with Right on, like other, more polite people.
April 2, 2009 at 4:22 pm
persiflage
Everyone’s story is different. My first baby breastfed well. The second had to go on the bottle at 10 weeks because my gynaecologist could not be bothered, and put me on a contraceptive pill which dried up my milk. She hated the bottle, would drink only four or five ounces, and would not take a bottle from anyone other than me. I still shudder when I remember this traumatic time. My third baby was breastfed for nine months, but when I returned to part time work after five months, he had a bottle from his carer.
April 2, 2009 at 5:36 pm
innercitygarden
persiflage – the other factor I was thinking of, but didn’t get around to mentioning, was medication and other medical intervention. So many women are put in a position of having to choose between treating their own medical conditions and breastfeeding, and it’s just not good enough. More breastfeeding friendly medical treatment is definitely on the list of things we need.
April 8, 2009 at 11:23 pm
tangerine meg
Well said, all!
April 16, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Rebecca
Oh Kate. So well said. I normally duck and run from breastfeeding discussions because – well just because. Fed my first til she was 13 months and frankly No Longer Interested. She was busy and well fed and it just stopped.
Then I had twins, including a very very hungry boy and a very calm and accomodating girl and when, at four months, I could no longer tell which child I was feeding, but only that the boy was not getting enough I rang the Multiple Birth Association’s breastfeeding counsellor and she told me I just had to drop everything and do nothing but feed the boy for 48 hours to build up supply.
But what about my other baby, I asked, what about my elder daughter? (she was just 4 and not much more than a toddler really)
Well, the counsellor said, you’ll have to find someone else to look after them – it’s only a couple of days. Oh, and you’ll have to express extra for the other baby and get someone else to feed it (she said ‘it’). Just, she said, do nothing but feed. And milk yourself.
Wow.
So my mother was in the last stages of metastasised bone cancer and needed me to look after her, not the other way around. And my husband was working full time and also had a broken ankle in a cast at the time and yes, as you say, there was No One else. It would have been nice to keep feeding, but the very much more expensive and labour intensive bottle was the only answer for my twins. That, or hunger. And as a mum. that makes it a pretty simple choice in the end. NONE of us would see our babies hungry.
And you know what? They’re twins, right? So we are our own social experiment. One of them (like his 4 years older and 13-month-breastfed big sister) was reading chapter books in kindy. The other beautiful girl was much slower to start but is catching up rapidly in Year 1. The three of them contracted all the same kinds of diseases and I hate to say it but the eldest and most breastfed was probably a sicklier baby and with much less daycare! She’s by far the least active, but possibly the brainiest and certainly the most angsty (just like a good firstborn should be!)
Amazingly, as they are older, breastfeeding does not seem to translate to any discernible difference in the playground. Then again, who sends their kids to school with an “I was fully breastfed” sticker? Ew.
That’s where the patriarchy comes in, in my view, in commodifying every aspect of our parenting and making the guilt up by books, media interviews, training courses, qualifications that people earn which then have to be paid for by us ordinary folks feeling we need the people who have them!
Gawd Kate. My first comment for yonks and I’ve ranted. So sorry.
And your boy? I reckon he’s a natural… Don’t know about down your way but definitely Julian Ashton material up here.
April 16, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Rebecca
PS – I also cancelled my membership to the Multiple Birth Association, and its free breastfeeding counselling service, after that.
I needed the money for formula…