The comments to my post on recent post on breast cancer and breastfeeding challenged the idea that breastfeeding advocates are overplaying their hand when it comes to maternal benefits. I’m not questioning its overall benefits to babies; as Sugarmag points out, it meets babies’ nutritional needs precisely. No formula can provide the immunities that breastmilk automatically delivers. The only potential negative is that mother’s milk contain toxins, since we’re at the top of the food chain. (This concern seems to be far more widespread in Germany, where at one point even some advocates of natural childbirth counseled against nursing for more than six months.)
But for the mother, the balance of costs and benefits is more complicated. Advocates of breastfeeding naturally want to cast this balance in a positive light – and hey, that is their job! – but too often they present an oversimplified picture. As an example, I’d like to look at a La Leche League article that commenter Nawny pointed out. At first glance the article appears evenhanded, but it omits some crucial information. (I’m leaving aside the breast cancer issue, since the new information is too recent for us to expect it would already be included on the LLL website.)
The article makes the point that women can use breastfeeding to prevent conception. Here’s what it says:
As for fertility, the lactational amenorrhea method (LAM) is a well-documented contraceptive method, with 98 to 99 percent prevention of pregnancy in the first six months. The natural child-spacing achieved through LAM ensures the optimal survival of each child, and the physical recovery of the mother between pregnancies. In contrast, the bottle-feeding mother needs to start contraception within six weeks of the birth (Kennedy 1989).
And that’s all it says on this topic. I’m fairly sure I’m not the only person who knows a few unplanned babies who were conceived during this supposedly “safe” time. The problem is that no one can know if she’s ovulating until her periods has resumed. This happens roughly two weeks after her first postpartum ovulation. She can’t predict when this will occur, yet she’ll be fertile during that first cycle. The LLL article doesn’t mention this, nor does it urge women to use a second form of contraception if they don’t want another baby right away. That’s irresponsible.
The LLL also stresses that breastfeeding can help a woman lose her baby weight:
Production of milk is an active metabolic process, requiring the use of 200 to 500 calories per day, on average. To use up this many calories, a bottlefeeding mother would have to swim at least 30 laps in a pool or bicycle uphill for an hour daily. Clearly, breastfeeding mothers have an edge on losing weight gained during pregnancy. Studies have confirmed that nonbreastfeeding mothers lose less weight and don’t keep it off as well as breastfeeding mothers (Brewer 1989).
What they don’t mention is that many women have trouble losing the last ten to fifteen pounds. This makes sense, biologically. It’s nature’s protection against a nursing mother becoming emaciated and perhaps less able to produce milk. For women who’ve only heard that breastfeeding will help them get their figure back, those last pounds can be discouraging. A more honest message would note that those last pounds will likely persist until after weaning, but they needn’t be a permanent feature. Without that honesty, women may feel that they’ve suffered a failure of will.
Another issue that LLL doesn’t address at all in this piece is loss of sleep, which becomes a permanent feature of most nursing mothers’ lives. The standard advice (not offered here) is to pump milk and have your partner or other supportive person give it to your baby in a bottle when she wakes in the wee hours. This logic failed me – and many other mothers – on two counts. If your body is used to providing a 2 a.m. feeding, you’ll wake up with engorgement an hour or two later, at which point you’ll need to either pump or feed your baby! This advice also presumes that your baby will take a bottle, which both my sons steadfastly refused. I waited the obligatory month before even trying a bottle, because I didn’t want to wreck breastfeeding. By then, they were clever enough that they demanded their much-loved product, and they stuck to that line until they started to use sippy cups around eight months.
Anyway, chronic, severe loss of sleep depresses the immune system. It can worsen depression. After my first son was born, I was definitely depressed; sleep deprivation just about sent me around the bend. I appreciated the convenience of just rolling over and letting my sprout latch on. However, if I’d bottlefed, someone else could have done the job, and I would have been spared that taste of near-psychosis.
Research shows that women get worse sleep than men. As I’ve argued before, breastfeeding sets women up to do the bulk of nighttime parenting, thus ensuring that they’ll get lousy sleep long after their kids have traded mother’s milk for (heaven help me) juice and Sprite. (Okay, the Sprite is a rare indulgence.) Women who sleep poorly have a greater risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, depressions, and feelings of hostility, distress, or anger.
Also, engorgement and mastitis hurt. Like a son of a bitch! ‘Nuff said about that. And while it’s true that pregnancy alone is hard on the perky look, the constant inflation and deflation, eight to fourteen times a day, over months, leaves many mothers with breasts so altered that they feel like “not-self.” In a nutshell, that’s why my sister opted for implants after feeding two babies. Her body no longer felt like her own. Some of you may be thinking, how vain! But I can’t view her decision – or others like hers – as frivolous. Alienation from ones embodied self runs much deeper than mere vanity.
That’s surely not an exhaustive list of the physical costs of breastfeeding. It’s just the ones that spring first to my mind as having been omitted from LLL’s catalogue of maternal benefits.
And then there are the non-physical costs. New motherhood is a profound experience of losing autonomy. Breastfeeding amplifies this loss, especially if your baby won’t accept pumped milk in a bottle. Maybe the intimacy of breastfeeding compensates for that; maybe not. That’s an individual balance, and one I’m loathe to judge.
And finally, breastfeeding is not free. Hanna Roisin did a pretty fair job of setting out the social costs of breastfeeding in her controversial article in The Atlantic, “The Case against Breastfeeding.” But it’s her paragraph on the economic costs that really stuck with me.
The debate about breast-feeding takes place without any reference to its actual context in women’s lives. Breast-feeding exclusively is not like taking a prenatal vitamin. It is a serious time commitment that pretty much guarantees that you will not work in any meaningful way. Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.
Exactly. I’m one of millions of middle-class mothers who reflexively cringe when we see an infant taking a bottle. I did this the other night at Applebee’s; I assumed that the bottle was filled with formula, and I inferred from the adults’ clothing that they families were working-class at most. I thought to myself: “But breast milk is free!” Yes, I know better.
Really, we need to discuss the pros and cons of breastfeeding honestly. We need to discuss how much of the cons are attributable to lack of social support. We need to acknowledge when a con might not be ameliorated easily with a social social.
Because there’s a cost to spinning the data solely in favor of breastfeeding. Mothers quickly feel like failures if they encounter resistance – whether it’s a disapproving mother-in-law, an unsupportive boss, or plain old engorgement. They feel like failures if they can’t produce enough milk. They blame themselves. Honest advocacy that acknowledged the difficulties and possible harms to a mother’s health would be far more supportive than the one-sided presentations that were prevalent when I had my babies, and that still dominate the infoscape. They might also ultimately be more persuasive, if they could acknowledge women’s legitimate fears and give them techniques to cope.
Propaganda might guilt women into trying to breastfeed. But in order for them to keep it up, breastfeeding advocates need to supply a more balanced and truthful perspective. As I said in m last post, the preponderance of evidence favors breastfeeding. We who support it don’t need to stoop to the sort of propaganda that formula manufacturers use – though they call it marketing, of course.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
As I said on Octogalore’s blog, and on Alas, to the shock of everyone: I did not want to breastfeed and I refused. (I wasn’t even convinced of the whole motherhood enterprise in the first place, and you are asking me to do WHAT?) My boobs are mine, not sharing with anyone, not even my own kid. I’ve read Mary McCarthy’s THE GROUP! End of discussion. Do as you please, but I’d rather not. I totally support breastfeeding in public places, at work, everywhere. In fact, I’m a whole lot more radical than most people about the subject. I agree its healthier, blah blah blah…But I just did not want to breastfeed. Not a chance.
But rather than discuss that fact, that for some of us this position is as non-negotiable as motherhood itself, one of the Alas bloggers quickly started another pro-breastfeeding thread. (I obviously embarrassed everyone with my low-class ways.)
But if I’d said: I don’t want any babies! I had an abortion! — everyone would defend my right to do that. But the sentiment seems to be, if you have a baby, then by God, do it BY THE BOOK, bitch!
No room for ambivalence along the way… if you buy into motherhood, you have to buy ALL IN, “go big or go home”; whole hog or nothing…we are still very puritanical. Can you imagine the women who have had babies and given them away for adoption, how few of them we hear from? I think I know why.
We judge each other far more harshly than men judge us.
I can understand your position. I was definitely glad to get my body back, once my babies were weaned. I think the absolutism on breastfeeding is related to training women to realize their lives are no longer wholly their own. And of course, that’s true – for *all* parents – but we don’t seem to have nearly as much concern for socializing fathers into *their* new roles.
I think the bottlefed baby of a happy mother will, on average, be better off than the breastfed baby of a miserable, resentful mother.
Simiarly, I think if mothers could admit their ambivalence to each other (not to their kids!) more freely, we’d suffer less from ambivalence in the first place. This has begun to change in recent years, but instead of people embracing the “good enough mother,” we’ve got a few people (like Ayelet Waldman) bragging about how great it is to be the “bad mother.” This is just reversing the terms – not changing them altogether.
Because I was so sick after Baby Fizz was born, we alternated breastfeeding and bottlefeeding her first week or so. She’s now just breastfeeding and doesn’t seem to have had any issues when we’ve used the bottle for expressed milk. I was somewhat confused by the “no artificial nipples until breastfeeding is well established” recommendation because it wasn’t my experience. Do you know if there’s research on this point? i.e., confusion/development of preferences in infant feeding. I know it’s something that happens to a lot of people, but I’m curious as to how often.
At the moment, Baby Fizz is sleeping in our room, which allows us to divide the nighttime parenting quite well. My husband changes her diapers and bounces her, I do the breastfeeding. I’ve gotten to the point where I barely wake up in the night, which is definitely preferable to staggering downstairs to get a bottle ready. (The anecdotal evidence suggests to me that bottlefeeding makes all parties more exhausted.)
I also haven’t gone back to work yet, which I suspect will radically change how I view a lot of the co-parenting issues.
Oh, I definitely appreciated not fixing bottles! I did basically all of the nighttime parenting during my second sons infancy, because my husband was ill, and that wasn’t too rough. He slept after eating. My firstborn didn’t do that. My husband was out of town for work half the time; when he was home, he did a fair amount of the changing and bouncing, but not enough to keep me from losing my marbles. It was bad enough that I’m still surprised that we didn’t stop after one child.
I don’t know offhand if there’s research on the nipple confusion thing. I followed the standard recommendation, and maybe that was my downfall! But I also think some babies are just more stubborn than others. Both of my kids are strong-willed, and I guess their merciless rejection of bottles (and pacifiers) was the first hint of that.
Co-sleeping is great, but for me, it had an expiration date. For each of my babies, there came a point where co-sleeping kept them from sleeping through the night. I had these massive babies – 19 or 20 pounds at four months – who were certainly big enough to sleep through. WIth my firstborn, I missed the point where it would have been easy to move him to his own quarters. With my second guy, I recognized that he was ready for it right around four months, and from then on he slept eight or more hours at a pop. Up ’til then, I doubted the rumors that some babies actually did this!
I’m glad for you that things are working well, now, after your rough start. I’m especially glad that your coparenting is on a good track. You’re right that going back to work will change the balance, as will Baby Fizz’s changing needs. But you’ve done well so far, and I bet you’ll make the adjustment just fine.
I have to argue about a few of these points. I worked and exclusively breastfed both of my children. I know someone who was a medical resident (notoriously one of the hardest and most time consuming jobs available) who exclusively breastfed twins, with lots of pumping. I know lots and lots more success stories like that. Yes, laws should support longer maternity leaves and making pumping and breastfeeding easier for working mothers, but it is not true that women cannot work and breastfeed successfully.
I would also argue that in most situations, regardless of the feeding method, the mother will do almost all of the feedings, with the bottle or with the breast. And, based on observations I have made of friends and family, formula feeding ends up eventually taking more time that bottle feeding. You don’t have to purchase formula, mix it, clean and purchase bottles and nipples, etc.
I had problems early on with breastfeeding and needed lactation consultants to straighten out my issues, but almost anyone who successfully breastfeeds will come to a point where it is easy and instinctual. (Not from the start. But eventually). My husband was amazed and horrified by watching the rigamarole his sister had to go through to formula feed her sons. In the middle of the night, someone has to make the bottle. Yes, in an ideal situation, you have a husband who is willing to take all the night feedings, who has premixed bottles and gets to that baby the minute it makes a peep. But, in most cases, that isn’t what happens. Someone, usually the mom, will actually have to get out of bed to mix a bottle. That would absolutely not work for me, sleep wise. I suppose you could premix bottles and purchase a cooler to keep them in and always have someone else to do those night feedings…see how far from reality we are getting here?
If we are supposed to be reasonable, let’s be reasonable. Babies keep us up at night. Babies are stressful. I would argue that babies who don’t have breastmilk are more likely to have ear infections, GI infections, etc (well proven in the literature) and are much more likely to be up at night. I would also argue that babies who finish a bottle of formula in five minutes and don’t have a breast to suck on more slowly to pacify them back to sleep may leave a harried, tired parent with many less options at 2 am.
I know when you are tired and breastfeeding, it is really easy to look at the one thing that you have control over, the method of feeding, and try and tie all of your frustrations into that choice. But, pretending that breastfeeding is the reason a four month old doesn’t sleep through the night or is why a new mother is sleep deprived isn’t reasonable. I also think blaming the breastfeeding relationship for maternal resentment is unreasonable. I have known plenty of resentful formula feeding moms, and plenty of colicky formula fed kids.
Oh, but I do think accurate representation of reduction of cancer risks is obviously a good thing, and do think the success rate of breastfeeding as birth control is exaggerated. I am all for accurate information. But, speculating about resentment due to breastfeeding is not accurate information.
Sorry, I swear I am done with this last post. Mastitis is definitely not a given. I had it once with my second child, but it is not like everyone who breastfeeds gets mastitis. And, all women will be engorged painfully the third day or so after delivery, even if they don’t end up breastfeeding. Subsequent filling of the breasts for most women who have a successful breastfeeding relationship with their child and appropriate scheduling of feeding and/or pumping should not result in painful engorgement for most women.
I have no problem with the spirit of the post. Accuracy = good. But, speculation and exaggeration in either direction doesn’t help.
OK, I’ll take my triple posting self and leave gracefully this time;)
I’m glad you’re weighing in on this, MomTFH. I should emphasize that I mentioned resentment in connection with Daisy’s statement that she felt really strongly that she just did not want to breastfeed. My comment was that in such a situation, I think most babies would be better off with a bottle than with a resentful mother. Most women don’t feel resentment about breastfeeding, at least most of the time (!), with the possible exception of those nights where the child needs to eat ever 90 minutes or so. (That’s how my boys grew very large, very fast – that, plus they share my brother’s genes. He was on the same growth curve.) A bottlefed baby will usually be satiated longer, because formula is fattier (one reason why it’s not the optimal food). I’ll admit to the occasional night where I thought, bring on the bottle! Not that my kids would have taken it, mind you.
I agree with you 100% that breastfeeding is the best deal for the baby. The evidence is strong regarding digestive troubles – and I think it’s pretty strong for ear infections, too, though that’s less fresh in my mind. To my mind, the early antibodies are the killer argument in its favor. I breastfed my guys with relatively little drama until they showed interest in weaning around 10 months. I’m glad I could do it.
Agreed also on the convenience of breastmilk compared to bottles at night – and yes, it usually *is* the mom who gets up.
Regarding mastitis and engorgement: I don’t think they should be presented as major deterrents. They should be mentioned together with ways to recognize and treat them, so that women aren’t caught unprepared. Also, women need to be pointed to sources of support, because if you do hit such “technical” snags, you really need support. I was very lucky to have a visiting midwife with my first baby (another benefit of the German health system!). She came daily for the first week, and made several visits thereafter. With my second here in Ohio, I had help from a lactation consultant as needed. It wasn’t as great as my German experience, but it was still essential. I did have some persistent engorgement, and if I hadn’t already been experienced *and* had help, I might have given up.
I know lots of women who manage to successfully pump and return to work. And I pumped just fine; it’s just that my babies wouldn’t take a bottle, despite repeated efforts using all the tips we could find (have Dad do it, provide a smell that’s similar to Mom, etc.). I was able to work only because I had highly flexible duties at the time – first finishing my dissertation, then teaching part-time at the university, with six months of unpaid leave after my second birth.
Which leads me to my question – do you know anything about Evil Fizz’s question? She wants to know if there’s research to support the recommendation to completely avoid nipples other than the breast during the baby’s first month. Seems like the sort of thing you might know! I’d be curious, too, because if it’s *not* well-founded, it might make sense to introduce a bottle of breastmilk a bit earlier, to ensure that the baby won’t reject it forever.
Finally, the reason I wrote this post is not to knock breastfeeding – far from it! I just think that more complete and accurate information in advance is more likely to *keep* women breastfeeding beyond the first few weeks. Too many still go into it with an unrealistic picture and are then thrown for a loop when they run into difficulties.
I feel like my head is about to explode. I am going to have to read your post more carefully in the morning when I have slept, but a couple of things…the organization is La Leche League or LLL, not the LLL, because La is the. Ok that was completely unimportant, just a gripe.
Listen, I know darn well that LLL is not perfect and that there are things we can do better, but as a La Leche League Leader, I encouraged mothers to get more sleep by learning how to nurse while lying down. Many mothers find that if their baby sleeps in their bed with them they can nurse at night without having to wake up very much. Of course there are things that the parents must do to make their bed safe, like put up a rail or add and arms reach co cleeper, and make sure bedding will not go over a very young baby’s face, but it beats the hell out of getting out of bed, especially to prepare a bottle in the middle of the night. As I think you pointed out (I am sorry I am too tired to give your post the careful read it deserves) it is mothers who do most of the night time parenting regardless of what baby is eating.
So you have LLL which is a not for profit organization that has as it’s mission to empower women to breastfeed their babies by giving them the information and support they need fighting the good fight against money grubbing pharmaceutical companies such as Ross Pediatrics who make a lot of money convincing mothers that their product is just as good (it is not!) or that it is even better (if you can buy it it must be better). LLL is a bunch of moms trying to help other moms breastfeed their babies. Breastfeeding mothers need support. I am not saying we don’t make mistakes, but we are trying to help mothers, not sell a product. Ugh. I am going to bed now.
By the way, the evidence about whether mothers who are HIV positive can or should breastfeed is not clear. Check out an organization called Another Look. I think this was mentioned over at Figleaf, not here but you may be interested.
When I said breastmilk was free, I did not mean that women’s time or work is worthless. Not at all and what the hell? A person wants to hit me with a two by four for saying that? And here is the thing, if a person wants to have a baby but does not want to, oh you know, hold it, feed it, care for it, etc., then why are they having one? Oh right, hand it to a nanny, the father, grandma, whoever because who needs a mother? Anyone can do that stuff. Just find a place to store the baby while you work and give it artificial milk, the baby will never know the difference.
I read a good post recently on nipple confusion. I could have sworn it was on Stork Stories, but I couldn’t find anything searching “confusion” for nipple confusion. I wish I could credit the post, but it confirmed my experience, which is that nipple confusion definitely exists, but it is difficult to predict which babies will experience it, and many babies can successfully take one or a few bottles early and have no problems.
I love kellymom.com, and found a few hits on nipple confusion. This seems like a good, balanced response here. Some babies can be picky, even to extremes where one will reject artificial nipples completely and some that will refuse the breast once they have an artificial nipple.
Breastfeeding friendly standards of care recommend feeding an infant supplement feeding, if necessary, with a syringe, cup, supplemental nursing system, or spoon, especially if the breastfeeding relationship has not been confidently established. Of course, this is not practical at all for most people going back to work. Hopefully most people have at least a month off and have good support.
As for babies that refuse the artificial nipples, sounds like you and your husband tried most of the tricks. My younger son was pickier about it than my older one. He did eat when he got hungry enough and did eventually get used to it, but for a frequent feeder and chubby little man, he sure went on hunger strikes when I was at work. From what I hear he was fairly cheerful about it, so I guess it wasn’t torture for anybody, and he wasn’t losing any weight.
The key is making sure the baby is healthy (and of course that the mother is, but neither formula nor breastfeeding cures stress, mess, or sleep deprivation). A good pediatrician and lactation consultant can help make sure the baby is hydrated and a healthy weight, and make recommendations that may help make the relationship less stressful.
I am of the belief that deciding to use a supplemental feeding method for an early feeding, when a mother is intending to breastfeed, should not be done as a spur of the moment decision. It should be done in consultation with a lactation consultant or pediatrician. Especially for a sleepless night or perceived low supply. There are so many reasons why a baby may seem to be power nursing or cranky that are not simple feeding problems.
Thanks for the resources on nipple confusion. I was very scrupulous about making sure that I didn’t do anything that could divert them from breastfeeding. Both my babies caught on to nursing very quickly and did it very well. My firstborn went from 8 lbs. 6 oz. at birth to 13 pounds at six weeks – I think this is partly genetics, because my brother had a similar growth curve, going from 9+ at birth to 14 pounds at six weeks. But obviously these guys were very successful at getting what they needed.
So maybe, given that they had no trouble with latching on etc., my babies would have been okay with taking a bottle at three weeks (I think we waited 5 or 6 weeks before even trying). But as you say, no one knows which babies will decide that the bottle is easier and then reject the breast. Given that mine proved stubborn in rejecting the bottle, they might have just as stubbornly refused to nurse if they liked the bottle …
My older son went on hunger strikes similar to what you described, except that he never did take a bottle, no matter what. Period. Like your younger guy, he didn’t starve, either, but he definitely would have risked dehydration before he would have given in. At nine, he’s still one of the most persistent people I know. This will be an asset to him someday, I think, but it has made for some challenges in parenting.
OK I am a little embarrassed that I did not wait until morning to comment. MOMtfh’s comments cover much of what I want to say. As she points out, that a mother can not work and breastfeed is simply not true. By the way, by the time my daughter was four months old, I had gotten really good at carrying her around in a sling and I was able to do things like nurse and grocery shop (by that I mean walking around the store, taking things off shelves, and putting them in a cart) using my sling. There are many many jobs that I could have done while nursing my baby in a sling. It is the toddler stage that is more difficult and at that point mothers simply must make a decision about how they will find balance. This is extremely difficult no matter what baby eats because presumably mother actually does want to spend time with baby.
About breastfeeding suppressing ovulation, as long as the baby has not started solid foods and is nursing at night (easy to do if baby is in bed with you) then this form of birth control is highly effective. No birth control is 100%, condoms break. I just looked at this article, it was published by LLL and it was written by a medical doctor who is also an Internationally Certified Lactation Consultant. Perhaps the author should have given more info about LAM, but the article was not about that, it was a brief overview of the benefits.
What bothers me so much about seeing LLL get beat up here is that the whole purpose of LLL is to help mothers negotiate the problems you mention. Talking to other breastfeeding mothers about how they overcame difficulties and to discuss what is normal for a breastfed babies can be a lifeline to breastfeeding mothers. That is what we do at LLL meetings. That is what LLL Leaders do when mothers call us on the phone with breastfeeding questions. We are volunteers who are trying to help other mothers.
When Leaders help mothers, we try very hard to practice active listening and to offer suggestions rather than advice. Sometimes mothers already know the answer to their own question and they just need and ear. Others times their are a variety of solutions that might work and we offer information and ideas if that is what the mother wants. Leaders are people and sometimes we fail at this. But the Leader application work stresses empathetic, active listening and offering suggestions rather than advice. We are not supposed to ever say to a mother, “You should…” But we are human and sometimes we as individuals fail.
About night time parenting, a Leader would only suggest to a mother that she pump at night in an unusual situation. What we actually do is help the mother think of ways that she can get more sleep. Having baby in the parents bed is only one option. Some mothers put a mattress on the floor next to their bed and when baby wakes up, they lay down next baby and nurse and then eventually go back to bed. So called co sleeping does not have to be all or nothing, and what we stress is that there is no one right way and the best place to sleep is where everyone sleeps best. At meetings Leaders often say to mothers, “Please feel free to take what works for your family and leave the rest.”
When LLL was founded in 1956, several mothers met a church picnic and they talked about their varying degrees of success with breastfeeding and how they did not know anyone else who breastfed and were unable to get the help they needed. They decided to meet at the home of one of the mothers to talk about it more, and these (it ended up being 7) founded an international organization that now helps mothers breastfeed around the world. The mission of LLL is to provide information, education, encouragement and support to mothers who wish to breastfeed. That is right WISH too.
Some mothers may for their own reasons simply not want to nurse. I do not think that anyone believes they should be forced to! The propaganda you mention, by the way, such The Ad Council ads, have nothing to do with LLL. Those ads are sponsored buy the federal government and they did not ask LLL before running them. LLL is not above reproach, but we do strive to provide accurate information. We are mothers and we are volunteers and we have helped countless mothers successfully breastfeed. I am very proud to be a part of it.
Sugarmag, I’m not fundamentally putting down LLL. I was responding specifically to Nawny’s comment in the previous post, where she singled out this particular LLL article as being balanced. My point is that the piece appears more balanced than it is. This matters not just as a point of principle, but also in practical terms, because I believe we’d have better success getting women to not just start breastfeeding but stick with it if information were more complete.
I fully agree with you that breastmilk is the best food for babies, that LLL volunteers provide an essential service, and that you’re up against a mega-marketing machine. Again, that’s not the focus of the post, which was fairly narrow in criticizing the one-sidedness with which pro-breastfeeding information presents the benefits to mothers. I understand that it’s only natural to present just the good side, because Nestle et al. are certainly doing exactly that for their products. But it’s not the whole picture.
I didn’t pick on the Ad Council ads because they are much more obviously one-sided. I agree with you that LLL does a better job than that. I looked at this particular article because it’s more complex. In fact, its form of argumentation is one I try to teach my students: anticipate possible counterarguments and evidence, and then deflate them. The LLL article does this very effectively. However, my point is that this creates an appearance of being more even-handed than it actually is. Some of my objections could be very easily addressed by adding a short phrase with a link to more information. For example, the paragraph on LAM could have noted that anyone planning to rely on it should take steps to avoid unwanted pregnancy, and then given a link to a page that provides a more thorough explanation.
Of course babies are work. Nothing I’ve written – or experienced! – disputes that.
I’m arguing that breastfeeding in our current culture, which presumes that mothers will be primary caregivers anyway, becomes part of socializing women into shouldering the lion’s share of parenting, and that this has real costs in terms of health and money. Everything you say about nighttime feeding is true and useful, but it doesn’t address this inequality. In an ideal society, breastfeeding wouldn’t be part of socializing mothers to do most nighttime parenting even years after the child is weaned, and so long-term we need to keep advocating for a more equal distribution of parenting work. Short-term, I think it’s a fair question to ask how feeding practices play into an unequal distribution.
As for combining paid work with wearing a baby: There are quite a few jobs that might be do-able with a baby in a sling, but very few employers that would tolerate it. Certainly I couldn’t expect to wear a baby to teach. Even in an ideal world where employers were tolerant of babies in the workplace, not every baby would allow the mother to do her job. My second son slept a lot, and I could do a lot while wearing him. My first son was very demanding, slept very little, and wouldn’t stay in any situation for long – including a sling or carrier. There’s no way I could have taken him into an office or classroom without it being totally disruptive.
Anyway, I hope it’s clear that I’m not attacking LLL as an organization, and that I’m glad you’re offering support to mothers that’s often unavailable through any other means. I appreciate the work you do. I also think your description of the group and its approach might be useful to someone who stumbles on this post in the future.
You should NOT reflexively cringe when you see a woman giving an infant a bottle. Not all women can breastfeed. My mom didn’t make enough milk when I was a baby and I had to be put on formula after I lost weight. I didn’t make enough milk either — after 2 weeks with a lactation consultant, pumping 8x a day for 15-20 minutes, plus feeding my daughter with formula given through a tiny tube that went next to the nipple so it would get further stimulation, I made a whole 3/4 an ounce from both breasts combined, not even enough for a 2 week old. THe lactation consultant didn’t think I would ever make more. So, I stopped — no dripping, no hardness — my breasts had never even gotten bigger during the pregnancy. My sister had the same experience for both her pregnancies, so it is perhaps genetic. I am sure there are women who can’t breastfeed due to their medications or for other reasons. So people really shouldn’t judge a woman if they don’t know what her situation is.
I agree completely – that’s why I describe it as a reflex, not as a reasoned thought. I have a pretty good idea what you went through because a good friend of mine had a similar experience.
In my post I used myself of an example of how we’re socialized to judge other women’s mothering – and our own! – and even though we’ve consciously rejected such judgments, they are deeply ingrained in our unconscious minds. I’m not just a mother of two, I’ve also an academic who’s spent the last 20 years studying the history of motherhood, childbearing, and medicine, so I’ve thought about these issues a lot, written tens of thousands of words on the history of constructing the “bad mother,” and yet I’m not immune to the temptation to judge. In no way am I defending my gut reaction; I’m criticizing it with the intent of showing how pervasive and deep-seated those judgements can be.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Thanks Sungold, I know I overreacted. This is just a little too close to my heart.
No problem. You couldn’t do this work – as a volunteer, no less – if you weren’t passionate about it. And what you wrote here actually serves as a pretty *good* PSA for LLL.
And CC, we mothers just can’t win. No matter how we feed our babies or what we do, someone will find fault with it. I have noticed that the people who are the most judgmental and have the most parenting advice are those who either have never had a child or who had children 50 years ago.
Oh, the older ladies on the streets in Germany were always brimming with advice! My children were usually dressed too skimpily (thus risking a deadly draft) or too warmly (thus depriving them of fresh air). But hey, any stranger giving me unsolicited advice was usually pretty nice. They weren’t the ones giving me the evil eye.
It hurts my heart how this subject raises so many complicated emotional reactions. How a new Mom, already crammed with unfamiliar hormones, is supposed to work all this out without shame, fear, guilt and feelings of inadequacy I really don’t know. I’m feeling close to it myself because my daughter-in-law recently had so many problems with breastfeeding that she “quit”, although she pumped breast milk till my grandson was five months old and supplemented with formula. She said that every time she fed Brady a bottle in public she wanted to shout “This is breast milk.” I also noticed that she began to make up excuses as to why it didn’t work out and I’m sure a lactation expert would have said it all could have been resolved. In fact, I saw problems with lack of support from her mother and even from my son as well as a nurse or two who was unhelpful or who leapt too quickly to the formula supplement solution. But in the end, I fully believe that my daughter-in-law made the decision that was best for her, her son and her family and I fully and absolutely supported her in that decision. No once can weigh and balance the conflicting demands better than the mother. Period.
I think that women should have access to all the information. Then I think women should be supported in whatever decision they make about breastfeeding or formula feeding or both. Then I think women’s decisions should NOT be challenged. Period. Is there any area of decision-making where mothers are granted full autonomy and not judged for the decision they make? My daughter-in-law is a wonderful mother; her mother is a wonderful grandmother; my son is a wonderful father. Finally, my grandson is a healthy, happy little one. Could this be wrong?
Your daughter-in-law’s experience sounds a lot like that of the friend I mentioned above in my reply to CC. Her two children have been at my house all day today, and – at nine and six – they are thriving in every way. I realize this is anecdote, not data, but stories are important nonetheless.
Mothers who pump and provide breastmilk in the bottle have got the worst of both worlds – the time/energy commitment of breastfeeding and the inconvenience of cleaning and preparing bottles. I’m amazed that your daughter-in-law stuck with it as long as she did.
I agree that there’s way too much judgment around breast versus bottle. Right now, though, I think it’s hard for women to make an informed and free decision either way. Proponents of both sides provide imbalanced information (and as I said repeatedly above, the formula makers are the worst offenders by far). But probably more importantly, so many women don’t get enough support. I see lots of very young mothers around here who come from poor Appalachian families, and they almost invariably bottle feed. While I definitely don’t want to suggest that they would all breastfeed if given more information and better support, the fact that nearly all rely on formula suggests that their decisions are systematically steered in that direction, and that the decision to breastfeed is partly a function of privilege and of middle-class cultural forces.
I’m so glad your grandbaby and his family are doing well.
Maybe what I meant was, let’s not blame women when they “choose” – if their choices somehow happen to be free and fully informed, they have the right to choose bottle-feeding or breast feeding without fear of negative judgments about their choices. If they live in contexts in which fully informed, free choices aren’t really possible, we ought to be even LESS judgmental.
Thanks for helping me to think this through even further!
My grandson is GORGEOUS beyond words.
Yes, I agree completely on withholding judgment.
Yesterday Ohio’s Supreme Court issued a ruling that will make it even harder for nursing mothers to combine paid work with breastfeeding. They may have been bound by the law – I’m not sure – but clearly there’s a need for laws that would mandate breaks for pumping or feeding. Even better would be guaranteed, paid maternity leave, like other civilized countries have.