Another screed on breastfeeding & guilt – this time with cussing!

Oh, this comes at a great time. This comes at a PERFECT time. I was literally in the middle of writing a conference proposal for a presentation on breastfeeding as a reproductive right, and I check my e-mail. My friend (thanks for loving Internet drama, Beth!) had forwarded me the following links on breastfeeding and baby-friendly:

The first was from a feminist blog called the F Word, by a guest blogger named Laurie Hearts, "Baby friendly - but is it woman friendly?":

Manchester's largest maternity unit, St Mary's, is set to become a Unicef-approved 'Baby Friendly' hospital by ceasing to provide free formula milk to the women who give birth there. ... Women who choose to formula feed at St Mary's will have to bring their own ready prepared milk in cartons from this November; powdered milk will be banned for health and safety reasons. ...

In an era when many feminists are (in my opinion rightly) dismayed by the suggestion that a woman's right to an abortion should be subject to conditions, I have been shocked by the high level of acceptance when it comes to the notion that women who formula feed should be forced to justify their choice, not only to medical staff, but to pro-breastfeeding women. While I have never seen anyone claim that formula is better than - or even equal to - breast milk, a large number of women are vociferously and uncompromisingly against a woman's right to choose formula milk. I have witnessed a sizeable number of women, some of whom are self-declared feminists, debating on one another's social media profiles and calling for formula to be made illegal.

The second was from Jessica Valenti's blog:

[F]or me, formula feeding was absolutely, 100% better than breastfeeding. Like, life changing better... refusing to give mothers access to formula is not "baby friendly or helpful - it’s shaming and in some cases could be very dangerous. Enough already.

I usually don’t swear very much on my blog (real life is a different story) but like all good screeds, this was written while I was feeling just a little riled up. So: Holy shit. Let’s just make this clear: baby-friendly is not about preventing you from formula feeding. I work in a hospital that is pursuing baby-friendly certification. Most women at our hospital plan to breastfeed. Some women plan to formula feed. A fairly significant percentage of the breastfeeders choose to use formula at some point. The straight-up formula feeders never hear a word about breastfeeding from us. You told us on admission you planned to formula feed, here are your bottles. The breastfeeders who need to use formula for medical reasons – and they are very clearly outlined, including hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) and excessive weight loss – get formula too (and we are very fortunate to be able to offer them the option of donor milk if they are not comfortable with formula.) The breastfeeders who ask to use formula – this happens not infrequently, often because “I think I don’t have enough milk” – get education and discussion, sign a consent form, and then are given formula too. (No, we don’t have them bring in their own formula like the hospital profiled; we can debate whether that’s any different from making them bring their own baby clothes, but I think there’s a legitimate debate there.)

However, while I have a lot of respect for Jessica Valenti, she and the other blogger are completely mischaracterizing the issue here. Baby-friendly is not part of the mommy wars, and I honestly think it is irresponsible to do so. What makes hospitals baby-friendly is not preventing women from choosing formula feeding, or refusing to give them formula when their babies need it. Baby-friendly is not about forcing mothers to do anything. Baby-friendly is about preventing HOSPITALS from shoving bottles and pacifiers into breastfed babies’ mouths and then sending their unknowing mothers home with a screaming, nipple-confused baby who won’t latch. Baby-friendly is about preventing HOSPITALS from accepting “free” formula and gift bags and samples from formula companies, turning the hospital into a shill for a for-profit company, and engaging in practices that research has shown make it less likely for women to reach their own breastfeeding goals. Baby-friendly is about forcing HOSPITALS to offer regular breastfeeding education to all their staff, including nurses and doctors, so they can help mothers and not give them crap advice. Baby-friendly is not about the mommy wars. It is not about trying to force any mother to breastfeed. It is about changing HOSPITAL practice, and whether or not you realize it, most hospitals in the U.S. have a long, long way to go. Baby-friendly is about offering evidence-based care to promote health.

“Who are you to decide that breastfeeding promotes health? Formula feeding can be lifesaving!” Hell yes it can. You think I don’t see that? I see that all the time. When women are dealing with a new baby, sleep deprivation, hormone shifts AND feeding issues, you are dealing with a potent cocktail for severe depression – you think I never meet women with serious PPD? You think I don’t see women with intense pain from feeding, or a history of low supply, or a baby who isn’t transferring milk well? You think I don’t see women who are BBAC (breastfeeding baby after challenges), who are having the same issues as their last hellish breastfeeding experience, where we talk through their situation and their emotions and their individual needs and they decide that on balance, formula feeding is the healthiest thing for them and their babies? You think I don’t see women with insufficient glandular tissue to make enough milk, whose babies will starve without supplementation? That I never meet women, like Jessica Valenti, who had life-threatening health issues and premature deliveries, who are pump dependent and struggle to make even a tiny supply? You think that because I work at a baby-friendly hospital I refuse to let any of those women use formula? Of COURSE I do. Of COURSE formula is lifesaving. And it doesn’t NEED to be lifesaving to be OK. I see women who just decide that breastfeeding isn’t for them. They don’t want to breastfeed. Maybe they said they wanted to because they wanted to give it a try, but they’re not that into it. I shrug and move on. As a lactation consultant and public health professional, I would love for more women to choose to breastfeed. The lady in Room 4 doesn’t want to? We gave her the spiel, and it’s her choice.

So “formula-should-be-illegal” Judgy McJudgersons out there (even though I think there are fewer of them out there than their reputation): Shut up. Yup, I said it. You can never know what’s really going on in a woman’s life. When you demand that a woman give you a good reason for not breastfeeding, you have no clue what you’re asking. How about this: “Well, I was sexually abused as a child and I had very frightening flashbacks every time I breastfed.” Is that the reason you need to hear? Women don’t need to justify their feeding choices to you. They don’t need formula to be made illegal “for their own protection”. Because even if a woman doesn’t have a “good”, “morally correct” reason to breastfeed (just like many women do not have “socially approved” reasons for having an abortion), “I just didn’t want to” is reason enough. “But if they were really informed – ” No. I know we don’t do a very good job with breastfeeding education in this country. Please, if you really care about educating women, do not do it by asking nosy questions of your pregnant friends or of the woman with a bottle next to you on a park bench, or post judgy comments on mommy wars-fueling news articles. Lobby our elected officials to stop slashing funding for maternal and child health programs. Volunteer to teach classes at a community center. Write a letter to your local hospitals encouraging them to become (gasp!) baby-friendly.

Finally, let’s stop with the idea that women who tried to breastfeed – who wanted to breastfeed – and couldn’t breastfeed, shouldn’t be sad. Do I think they should feel guilty? That they should feel ashamed? HELL NO. But it’s OK for them to mourn something they had hoped to do, and couldn’t. It’s also OK for them NOT to mourn it, to just accept it and go on, to appreciate the things about formula feeding that are positive for them. Everyone is different. But women who had looked forward to providing milk for their baby, who planned to have a positive nursing relationship with their baby, can feel sad about the loss of those hopes. That does not mean that “boob nazis” made them feel guilty and should just stop it with the baby-friendly bullshit already. It doesn’t mean that formula is supernifty and that we should let formula companies engage in deceptive marketing practices and co-opt hospital staff. It means we should support those women and help them work through their sadness so that they can move forward feeling good about themselves as mothers. It means that we should work harder to offer donor milk so that if those mothers are helped by knowing their baby is still getting breastmilk, they have the option to choose it. It means we should continue to research ways to help women so that they ARE able to reach their breastfeeding goals.

I am just tired of this argument. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when we hate on breastfeeding initiatives like baby-friendly, we hate on the very things that make it possible for women to breastfeed. An individual woman’s feelings of being judged or of guilt are REAL issues that deserve their own space and time (that’s why I just gave them their own paragraphs). But they are not the same thing. They are different. Different things. The end.

(As I was finishing this up, I saw that Gina at the Feminist Breeder has also written a post prompted by those blogs, "Why I’m a Feminist AND a Lactivist", and I highly encourage you to go and check it out.)

Link party, August blogcation

I guess my blogging is on an August hiatus? Between traveling and bracketing the traveling with long shifts at work, I am not doing much blogging (also, my e-mail inbox hates me - at least, I assume the feeling is mutual. So if you've e-mailed me and not heard back, that may be a factor.) Early September may not be much better, but I promise to post again soon!

In the meantime, some links:

* Jessica Valenti on learning to love her baby through a harrowing delivery and long NICU stay


* From Birthing Beautiful Ideas, these are many of the reasons that I too love being a doula!


* Elita at Blacktating ponders the idea of the "relief bottle".


* A doula's birth story that highlights some of the ways a doula can play an important role in a planned cesarean


* The Unnecesarean links to this excellent piece on the co-opting of "pregnancy is not a disease" by anti-contraception organizations, and then breaks it down:

...this whole conversation is ridiculous. We are only having it because somebody, somewhere, is upset that women are having sexy non-babymaking funtimes they don’t approve of, and they’re determined to make us all pay for their inability to deal with not everybody agreeing with them that this is bad.

Go on, read the whole thing!


* And for the lighter side of things... I've just discovered the webcomic Married to the Sea, and in celebration they clearly did a comic just for me:



There are lots more!

Reply turned post: Bottle feeding, breastfeeding, and the NICU

I vent a lot (maybe too much... trying to stay open to positive possibilities for education and cooperation) about the NICU & breastfeeding.

Because of those challenges, this post on My OB Said What caught my eye today: "You’ll get him home sooner if you just bottle feed," – NICU nurse to breastfeeding mother of a NICU baby. Many commenters chimed in to rightfully assert that the mother's breastmilk is much better than a bottle of formula, especially for a NICU baby, but I think this is not quite what the nurse meant. This was my comment:

"This is sad but true... the requirements for the NICU babies to go home is to take all feeds PO (by mouth), maintain their oxygen sats on room air, and maintain their temp. The PO feeding requirement leads to a lot of bottles because they are the easiest and fastest way to declare the baby capable of all-PO feeding. I have met very few moms able to avoid any bottles in the NICU. It basically means insisting on gavage feeding for every feed at which the mother is not present, and it is hard for the mother to be present 24/7 because the NICU is not set up for that. So it absolutely can mean that the baby stays longer. It is very frustrating because direct breastfeeding is best and least taxing for these babies."

It's a real catch-22. The way to prove the baby can do OK on all PO feeds is for the mother to breastfeed him/her around the clock. But there is often nowhere for the mother to sleep after she's discharged from the hospital herself. So to be with her baby 24 hours a day to breastfeed, she has to agree to bottle feeds to "prove" her baby can effectively take all feeds by mouth. The bottle feeds can and do cause issues with breastfeeding, but even for the most motivated mom, it can be a very difficult choice between agreeing to many bottles, and waiting extra days to take her baby home.

Recently, I saw a baby born at 32 weeks go to the NICU, have nothing but breastmilk and never have a single bottle touch her lips, and eventually go home feeding exclusively at the breast. Her mother was highly educated and motivated, had excellent family and community support, and really advocated for herself and her baby. As LCs, we were all so amazed and impressed by what they did. It was truly an accomplishment in a NICU environment... and it took bucketloads of privilege. Very few people are able to accomplish that without support from the staff, which the nurse quoted above was definitely not providing. Staff support is a huge issue. I have even heard a NICU nurse say "If they don't want to bottle feed, I just tell them 'We can put a tube down your baby's nose instead' [referring to gavage/NG tube feeding] - that changes their mind!'" A really inappropriate thing to say just to scare parents, given that this way of feeding may be necessary for certain babies who aren't able to safely do PO feeds.

In my perfect fantasy world, NICU babies who are ready to do PO feeds are moved to private or semi-private rooms that have a space for mom to sleep, so she can be with the baby 24/7 and breastfeed easily. She can stay there until the baby is ready to go home. Bottles are only given with explanation and consent, used appropriately, and stopped quickly if they begin to cause breastfeeding issues. Is this really such a crazy fantasy?

Who should get donor milk? Who should it be offered to?

Dou-la-la's post on encouraging the informed milk use of donor milk over formula supplementation got me thinking. At the hospital where I work, I have a lot of parents ask me about supplementation. They want to do los dos from the beginning, or they believe that the mother's colostrum isn't sufficient, or they're concerned that the fussy baby who wants to nurse constantly is starving, or they're tired of the fussy baby nursing constantly and just want to sleep. If they're really set on it, I encourage them to supplement at the breast vs. with a bottle, and not to give too much. If they're considering it but haven't decided yet, I do my best to educate them about risks of supplementation, including compromising future milk supply and altering the baby's gut. But in the end, it's their baby and their choice if they want to supplement.

Sometimes, I have to tell parents - even parents who don't particularly want to hear it - that we need to supplement. Because their baby has lost too much weight, or because there are latch difficulties, or because there is persistent hypoglycemia not helped by just direct breastfeeding. We do our best to supplement with only the mom's own expressed milk, but sometimes we have trouble getting enough of it out. In the end, those parents have to supplement - it's a medical necessity.

The thing is, no one at our hospital actually has to supplement with formula. We have banked, pasteurized human milk available for our NICU babies, and the term babies can access it as well if the parent requests it and gets a physician order. We don't need to ration it; the milk bank will tell us if they're running low and will ration appropriately on their own. We can offer it to anyone we want and they can use as much as they need while they're in the hospital, with the cost covered completely by the hospital, regardless of their insurance (or lack thereof). But once they go home, they have to purchase it from the milk bank directly themselves (unless they can convince their insurance provider to reimburse) or they have to find donor milk through other, less formal channels (as Dou-la-la discusses).

The other day one the nurses made an observation to me about who she usually sees using donor milk and who she doesn't. She asked if we offered it to everybody or if there was some discrimination going on. It got me thinking about it, and I talked to one of the other LCs about who gets offered donor milk and who should get offered donor milk. We had fairly similar feelings about it, but I won't say right now what we thought. I would like to ask all of you.

Since there's now a fairly active blogosphere conversation about donor milk being the ideal supplement for babies who are not being fully breastfed by their mothers for whatever reason: Who should be offered donor milk when the decision to supplement arises - for personal or medical reasons - and who should not? Why?

No BPA ban for baby bottles

My friend and political informant Adriane sent this along a couple weeks ago, and I let work and Thanksgiving get in the way of e-mail. So this news is now a couple weeks old, but still important:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein blames the chemical industry for killing her effort to secure, in the food safety bill, a ban on BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups. She said late Wednesday that a last-minute deal with Sen. Enzi to ban BPA in such items six months after the bill passed was scuttled by the chemical industry, which was able to get the support of some Republicans – she named Sen. Richard Burr in particular. Feinstein hoped to get Leader Reid’s approval to offer an amendment, but she told PULSE late Wednesday that her understanding was that he wouldn’t allow them.

“It’s very, very frustrating,” she said. “I cannot understand how a chemistry group would oppose taking out a chemical which at the very least may well impact the endocrine systems of infants because they want to make money.”

Original link here.