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Anna T - Another Ridiculous Breastfeeding/Laziness post


atheistjd

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Her "my experiences must be shared by everyone else" mentality is certainly annoying....but it's also really common if you've ever spent time on mommy boards.

My pet peeve involves women who say things like "childbirth is easy and natural as long as you don't have negative thoughts. Look at how I had 4 kids unassisted!"

(google Laura Shanley, for example). Well, there are 7 billion people in the world. You birthed only 4 of them. Maybe happen to have a really wide pelvis and could birth a truck, or maybe you just got lucky.

Sure, there were times that I found breastfeeding perfect for me, since I tend to be a bit lazy and like the ability to be spontaneous. I found traveling with nursing babies to be surprisingly easy. I'm also the type of mom who tended to look for the bottle 5 min before dashing to the daycare on Monday morning, only to find that it had been sitting in the diaper bag all weekend and now looked like a science experiment. I also found, though, that trying to do anything without your baby beside you was a major pain when the baby refused to take a bottle, so I couldn't be spontaneous about things like dentist appointments. I'll also admit that nursing with bleeding nipples was the most painful thing that I have ever done, and that it was worse than the c-section.

This may be TMI, but for me, co-sleeping didn't affect my sex life because exhaustion had already killed it, plus my doctor once used my vag as a show and tell and pointed out the "vaginal atrophy due to breastfeeding" to the resident. (Doctor and resident were both female and I consented to the exam, but the description shook me up) My kids were lovely babies, but the sex life didn't fully recover until they were weaned and sleeping through the night in their own beds.

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My kid sister and BIL recently had their first baby. They're upscale, semi-granola types--the kind who shop at Whole Foods as a matter of course, for whom "organic" and "sustainable" are big advertising hot-buttons, and who really want to keep poultry in their suburban backyard. They aren't hippies, but they can be pretty damned crunchy.

So of course my sister planned on breastfeeding--she knows it's the healthiest option for newborns, but she's also surrounded by friends who have already have a kid or two, and all of these kids were/are breastfed for at least a year, often longer. It's the norm, in her group.

Problem was, she just couldn't produce enough milk to satisfy the little grub. He'd drink everything she had, but it wasn't near enough. It was obvious by the end of the first week that breastfeeding wasn't going to be enough.

Thank goodness my mom was there; she was the one who went out to Whole Foods to get a can of formula. And despite my mom's reassurances, my sister still felt horribly guilty about giving her kid formula--I mean, she was in tears over her body's inability to make enough milk for her kid. I know a lot of that was hormones and sleep deprivation, but months later, now that her milk supply has all but dried up and she's feeding mostly formula, she still feels enough shame about it to not tell her friends about it. Which is nuts (and she knows it). Poor kid. But in the meantime, her little dude's doing just fine and growing like a weed, which is the only thing that matters, or should matter.

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I find that most people in these debates (luckily not on FJ) make me stabby.

On point 1--it is 'supposed' to, in some ways be easy. She *is* right that if the system failed to often, our species would be extinct. But it could fail in, say (made up number, obviously) 50% of cases and we'd survive just fine--which is actually, not OK when your kid might land on the wrong side of that 50%. It's 'supposed' to be easy to have sex too, and look how many manuals there are in the world for that.

When I look at women like my sister (or my mother, for that matter) who had no trouble getting pregnant, carrying to term, or giving birth--but weren't able to produce enough milk to BF successfully once the kid arrived--it makes me think that the "natural" way of raising infants is as a shared activity within a community. Humans do tend to live in groups, after all, and the idea of the separate nuclear family is a very new one. One woman might not be able to produce enough milk, but another might produce huge amounts. Or maybe a woman who just lost her newborn could feed a "dry" woman's infant. Maybe some women, who kept producing milk for years after having their own children, could wet-nurse other women's infants (which we already know they did).

Child-rearing as a community activity--rather than isolated individual mothers having to be everything to their own kids at all times--would ensure that more kids of mothers who couldn't nurse them adequately survived. The DNA for low breastmilk production wouldn't get weeded out because culture would pick up the slack.

(And for all I know, there's a ton of anthropological and historical work already discussing this very topic, but it's not on my radar. Yet. Hmmm. I need another thing to geek out over like I need a hole in my head, but it could be interesting to look into... :techie-studyingbrown:)

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And despite my mom's reassurances, my sister still felt horribly guilty about giving her kid formula--I mean, she was in tears over her body's inability to make enough milk for her kid. I know a lot of that was hormones and sleep deprivation, but months later, now that her milk supply has all but dried up and she's feeding mostly formula, she still feels enough shame about it to not tell her friends about it.

Yeah, this is what is not right with the breastfeeding-is-easy mentality. I have no personal experience on the subject, but I don't really give a rat's ass if 98% of women's breasts produce chocolate milk and happy drugs and they have no problem in the world and only breast-fed babies can be the smartest babies. For those 2% of women who just. cannot. do it. - this mentality just makes them feel like a "bad mother" for NO reason.

Also, I am pro-choice. Women should have the choice to do what they would like with their reproductive functions and child-rearing options and breastfeeding options. Much like we as a society (even pro-choice people) make women caveat why they are on BC (oh, we just can't afford a child right now), or why they had an abortion (rape! health of the mother! SUPER-young :o ), we do the SAME THING to mothers. Women have to go out of their way to prove they tried, or wanted to, but just couldn't do it. That is not right, and makes people who cannot or CHOOSE not to breastfeed feel like shit when they are making a perfectly valid life choice. Yeesh!

p.s. someone remind me to turn off the internet if and when I have the baybeez - in case you can't tell, I can't stand the mommy wars!

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My kid sister and BIL recently had their first baby. They're upscale, semi-granola types--the kind who shop at Whole Foods as a matter of course, for whom "organic" and "sustainable" are big advertising hot-buttons, and who really want to keep poultry in their suburban backyard. They aren't hippies, but they can be pretty damned crunchy.

So of course my sister planned on breastfeeding--she knows it's the healthiest option for newborns, but she's also surrounded by friends who have already have a kid or two, and all of these kids were/are breastfed for at least a year, often longer. It's the norm, in her group.

Problem was, she just couldn't produce enough milk to satisfy the little grub. He'd drink everything she had, but it wasn't near enough. It was obvious by the end of the first week that breastfeeding wasn't going to be enough.

Thank goodness my mom was there; she was the one who went out to Whole Foods to get a can of formula. And despite my mom's reassurances, my sister still felt horribly guilty about giving her kid formula--I mean, she was in tears over her body's inability to make enough milk for her kid. I know a lot of that was hormones and sleep deprivation, but months later, now that her milk supply has all but dried up and she's feeding mostly formula, she still feels enough shame about it to not tell her friends about it. Which is nuts (and she knows it). Poor kid. But in the meantime, her little dude's doing just fine and growing like a weed, which is the only thing that matters, or should matter.

Oh, no, she's not telling them. They'd probably crucify her. To her face, they may nod and smile, and then there will all sorts of little digs, in the form of innocent questions, no doubt, such as, "You let the baby feed on demand, right? Because you almost always make enough milk if the baby if feeding on demand".

I hate the mommy wars and the superior mommies. Can you tell? Fuck them. I am all for breastfeeding, and I personally breastfed my babies, but it wasn't exactly some grand feat. I had enough milk that I could have fed all of the neighborhood babies. That's biological luck, and nothing more.

Actually, I am all for mothers doing what works out for them and keeping my nose out of it.

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I know a woman who had twins and couldn't produce enough milk for them but breastfed anyway because of the pressure to breastfeed. The babies were underfed for a while, though they turned out fine, and now she really regrets it.

Formula really is as good as breast-milk. I know people don't believe that (since pro-breastfeeding groups have basically lied about the benefits to breastfeeding), but it's true. The occasional study will find that, maybe, there is a tiny advantage to breast-milk, but for the most part science shows they're pretty much the same, and in some cases formula can be slightly healthier than breast-milk. There are other arguments for breastfeeding (cheaper, often easier, etc), but there is absolutely no reason to shame women about not breastfeeding.

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I hate the mommy wars and the superior mommies. Can you tell? Fuck them. I am all for breastfeeding, and I personally breastfed my babies, but it wasn't exactly some grand feat. I had enough milk that I could have fed all of the neighborhood babies. That's biological luck, and nothing more.

Actually, I am all for mothers doing what works out for them and keeping my nose out of it.

This. Plus, it's just another way to keep women divided and fighting each other.

I hate how a lot of the manuals are all, "You may experience some discomfort/difficulties..." - No, it might fucking hurt like hell at first. You might end up sitting on the bed crying your eyes out because the PPD fairy and Breastfeeding Failure Fairy showed up to double team you. It's not instinctive, and for those of us whose mothers did not breastfeed, it's new and not just Tab N goes into Slot M. I highly recommend Spilled Milk, a book of breastfeeding not-bright-and-shiny-from-moment-zero stpries.

I am happy I did it, and will do it again but everyone needs to make their own decision for their own life.

Although I did enjoy the extra sleeping-in possibilities while the MiniVixen was breastfeeding, but that might be because I had a job that starts around six am and goes until five-six pm.

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Militant formula feeding moms? Where are these women? They sure as hell don't live near me.

This is a topic that really irks me. I formula fed both my babies. I had my reasons, among them that I had extremely difficult pregnancies and needed a break, I needed medication that would interfere, I didn't have a strong support system, I wanted my husband to help out more, oh and most important - IT WASN'T ANYONE ELSE'S BUSINESS. Formula feeders really don't need anymore guilt from other moms. We get enough on every single can of formula - they are required to say "breast is best" on each can. There are some breastfeeding crazies that will go so far as to encourage HIV infected women in Africa to breastfeed their babies over giving them formula when it is well known that the virus can pass through breast milk. GOOD GRIEF.

If a woman chooses to breastfeed, that's great, I don't care, but I resent it when she tries to make other moms feel guilty. I got that a lot when my girls were infants. Hell, even my MOTHER was asked whether or not I was breastfeeding. Women at church (fundies) gave me heck over it. But this is a cross political thing - liberal women will also give other women hell over not breastfeeding. In my mother's day, a lot of women gave their babies formula and no one thought anything of it. But now try to find anything positive about formula feeding on the internet. I couldn't. I found one book that said we weren't sinners - and the reviews on that book I couldn't reprint anywhere. It was sick what these women said.

This issue even divided a friend and me. She told me I was a terrible mother because I didn't breastfeed like she did (for 5 YEARS on one kid). I didn't speak to her for several months. She told me breastfed babies had fewer allergies (her daughter has many more allergies than mine), bottle fed babies are overweight (mine were both small), and on and on. She is completely obsessed with the attachment parenting movement - the whole don't ever drop your baby for a single second. And men are only meant to be breadwinners. You sleep with your baby. Huh, I wonder how well that works out for them? I wouldn't blame their husbands for getting tired of that if it went on for many months or even years at at time. Work hard as hell, but no sex, no affection from me - I'm married to the baby now.

And like another poster said, breastfeeding isn't necessarily easier. You won't get sleep either way - in fact, you might get less sleep since you are the only one who can feed the baby at night. Some babies don't get enough milk and go hungry, but La Leche League and some fanatics will encourage these women to keep breastfeeding. Some women get horrible breast infections, also too bad. And formula is not rocket science - I had little premade measured cups of it I did myself that were not expensive. I kept them in the diaper bag and either I or my husband could make a bottle in a few seconds.

The whole point of being a feminist is choice. You can be lazy with a bottle and with a breast. Or you can say this child rearing business is too damn hard (sometimes it is!) and skip it all together. Whatever works for you.

Sorry about the soap box! I just got a lot of grief on this issue!

Agree with you 100%. I am child-less and the militant La Leche Leaguers annoy me (not all of them, just the 25% that are heavy on the guilt-tripping).

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Oh, no, she's not telling them. They'd probably crucify her. To her face, they may nod and smile, and then there will all sorts of little digs, in the form of innocent questions, no doubt, such as, "You let the baby feed on demand, right? Because you almost always make enough milk if the baby if feeding on demand".

Fortunately, pumping is also the norm in her group, because most of these women work. It allows the dads, who are a very hands-on bunch, to be involved in feedings (which was why my sister had planned to pump and bottle-feed part of the time).

So she can always tell them that pumping full-time worked out better for her, and it'll fly. It does bother her to feel she has to lie about it, though, as she's normally a very open, honest person. Plus, she wonders if any of her friends may have experienced the same thing she's going through--or might experience it in the future--and it pisses her of that anyone would be made to feel so guilty over doing what was necessary.

I think she will finally spill the beans, but right now it's still easier not to.

I hate the mommy wars and the superior mommies. Can you tell? Fuck them.

My own mother is appalled at the level of nitpicking judgment some mothers inflict on each other these days. She simply can't believe some of the issues women will use to beat other women up with--attachment parenting, home birthing, BF vs. formula.

When she became a mom for the first time, she was 19 years old and had a special-needs kid (a Rubella baby). She had no prior experience with babies, and a husband who was next to useless when it came to anything hands-on. She's said time and again that she doesn't know how she would have managed without other women who gave her practical advice and moral support. So to see mothers tearing each other apart over various child-rearing dogmas on the Internet, and watching my sister get so upset over the BF/formula issue, sickens her.

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Another Stupid Question Time for me: when did formula become "pushed on the poor"? Because everything I've heard from older generations is that for a good part of the 20th century breastfeeding was looked down upon as only something poor people did.

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I don't think it is pushed on the poor in the US. If anything, WIC pushes women to breastfeed. It is pushed more in developing nations, which is a shame because the women often do not have clean water or money for it.

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PBrooke, I think the "pushed on the poor" thing might be refering to WIC. Although, that's really pretty dumb because WIC also provides breastpumps to women who need them.

I think that more lower income women make the choice to use formula because they don't have the luxury to take an extended maternity leave and formula makes it easier to go back to work, especially if you work somewhere where pumping isn't really an option. There's also cultural factors. I know that breastfeeding is really supported in the Hispanic community but not as much in the AA community.

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PBrooke, I think the "pushed on the poor" thing might be refering to WIC. Although, that's really pretty dumb because WIC also provides breastpumps to women who need them.

I think that more lower income women make the choice to use formula because they don't have the luxury to take an extended maternity leave and formula makes it easier to go back to work, especially if you work somewhere where pumping isn't really an option. There's also cultural factors. I know that breastfeeding is really supported in the Hispanic community but not as much in the AA community.

WIC hasn't always provided both though, has it? I thought until relatively recently, it only provided formula.

And it wasn't that long ago (say, 30 years ago) that women were routinely told formula was better--less a 'push to the poor' and more a 'push it to the under-educated'--I know my mother believed that and also swallowed that it was 'low class' to BF.

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Formula really is as good as breast-milk. I know people don't believe that (since pro-breastfeeding groups have basically lied about the benefits to breastfeeding), but it's true. The occasional study will find that, maybe, there is a tiny advantage to breast-milk, but for the most part science shows they're pretty much the same, and in some cases formula can be slightly healthier than breast-milk. There are other arguments for breastfeeding (cheaper, often easier, etc), but there is absolutely no reason to shame women about not breastfeeding.

Excuse me, but that (the bolded part) is a very strong statement. Do you have any documentation for it?

As long as you have access to clean water and modern medical care, the health differences between breastfed and formula-fed babies are small. I haven't read up on this stuff in quite a while, since my kids are way past breastfeeding age, but I have never heard of any studies showing formula to be healthier than breastmilk. Again, documentation would be nice.

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Her third point is one of the reasons that I might hesitate to breastfeed. On one hand, it's a giant responsibility to be the only person in charge of feeding the baby, and even Daddy could never help with that. On the other hand, it can also be an enjoyable bonding time, and it seems unfair for Daddy to miss out on that completely. If I ever have kids, I will probably try to pump and then feed with a bottle, at least for a few months. This way I'm not the one who has to get up for every single night feeding, and also the baby will get to bond with other people in the family. But of course, I intend to keep working too so already the fundies would hate me.

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I never woke for the p.m. feedings. Daddy would change her, latch her on, support her while she drained the tanks, and then they would have their playtime. After I went back to work and was pumping, Dad would do the evening feeding, while I took a nap.

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My daughter's best friend wanted badly to breastfeed her baby, but she couldn't lactate. Her mother had had the same problem after both her pregnancies. And don't get me started about those poor women who've had mastectomies, and are forced to tell nurses and lactation specialists why they won't be nursing.

Meanwhile, my daughter lactated so much she had a freezerful of ziplock bags of milk, even when she was back to work fulltime and pumping on breaks. I told her that, two centuries ago, she would have been the village wetnurse.

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On one hand, it's a giant responsibility to be the only person in charge of feeding the baby, and even Daddy could never help with that. On the other hand, it can also be an enjoyable bonding time, and it seems unfair for Daddy to miss out on that completely.

We did this and it worked out quite well. Especially because she refused to take a bottle from me at all while she was nursing/weaning because she wanted to get her food straight from the source. He was able to do some of the night feedings so I could sleep, and it also worked when (gasp!) he had to take her places without me. We had one instance where she was sick, it was easier for him to stay home from work than me, and he had to call me from the hospital because she was not having any of the bottle - other than that, no issues.

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Also, I have several friends who did not nurse just because it grosses them out. Breastmilk is best, but really, that ew!ew!ew feeling would interfere with bonding if they had tried to breastfeed anyway. It is better to formula feed if that is how you feel.

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Stupid cow.

I did BF my son. He took to it like a duck to water. With my daughter I wanted to BF her but she was a preemie so that took care of that. I pumped and pumped and pumped when she was born but I never got a good supply established. I was heart broken because it meant so much to me. I desperately wanted her to BF but she was too preemie to have the sucking reflex and by the time she did my supply had long dried up.

Breast feeding is best, it's amazing and it is right for the baby, but sometimes you can't do it - either for physical (medical) or psychological reasons. Guilting people over what can be the natural choice for THEM, is wrong.

And lady, women have bottle/supplemental fed for millennia. A thousand years ago they would use a piece of cloth dipped in goats milk for the baby to suckle if they couldn't feed and couldn't find a wet nurse.

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Her third point is one of the reasons that I might hesitate to breastfeed. On one hand, it's a giant responsibility to be the only person in charge of feeding the baby, and even Daddy could never help with that. On the other hand, it can also be an enjoyable bonding time, and it seems unfair for Daddy to miss out on that completely. If I ever have kids, I will probably try to pump and then feed with a bottle, at least for a few months. This way I'm not the one who has to get up for every single night feeding, and also the baby will get to bond with other people in the family. But of course, I intend to keep working too so already the fundies would hate me.

Pro tip: breastfeeding straight from "the source" is waaaaaay easier and less time-consuming than pumping and feeding with a bottle. Also, some babies refuse to take a bottle when their mom is in the building. My daughter was like that: I would walk into the house while my husband was giving her a bottle, and she would immediately start crying for me and want to nurse. My poor husband would say "But I'm feeding her!" and I would say "It's not the same."

Daddies can get plenty of bonding in by holding and rocking the baby. And you can tell them diapers are their job, since nursing is yours. ;)

I hope this doesn't scare you away from breastfeeding . . . .

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Her third point is one of the reasons that I might hesitate to breastfeed. On one hand, it's a giant responsibility to be the only person in charge of feeding the baby, and even Daddy could never help with that. On the other hand, it can also be an enjoyable bonding time, and it seems unfair for Daddy to miss out on that completely. If I ever have kids, I will probably try to pump and then feed with a bottle, at least for a few months. This way I'm not the one who has to get up for every single night feeding, and also the baby will get to bond with other people in the family. But of course, I intend to keep working too so already the fundies would hate me.

The practicalities of pumping to feed get really difficult.

I'm not trying to be judgmental about choices (promise ;) ), but if I had to exclusively pump, I would be feeding formula--mostly because of the time constraints (more power to the people who try/succeed. And my complete understanding goes to those who don't).

Imagine that it takes 20 minutes (made up number :) to feed a wee 10 week baby who is nursing.

Now imagine that you're taking 25 minutes to pump (that assumes 5 minutes to set up and do all the pumping--realistically it takes a little longer to pump than to nurse and if I could fill my baby's tummy with 5 nursing-sessions per day, because pumping = less efficient, it would take 6-7 pumps to get that much milk) and 20 minutes to feed the wee baby (IME, babies eat at close to the same rate, regardless of how they're fed--at least the experts claim they're supposed to) plus 10 minutes to deal with washing things up and preparing the bottle. It's now taken almost an hour to do that same feeding, you get to repeat that in 2 hours.

(Daddy didn't miss out--he got to feed bottles for 14 hour days the 2 days per week he's home with her and the occasional overnight session--unfortunately, to keep up milk supply if I'm going to pass off the 2 am feeding w/ any regularity, I have to get up to pump at 2 am. which rather defeats the purpose since my main objection to 2 am feedings is being vertical and out of bed ;) )

But taht's just how it worked in my house, with my boobs, your experience may be completely different.

(damnit, Linnea posted as I was typing, so, what she said, including the 'baby thinks from the tap is a million times better than the bottle' point)

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The practicalities of pumping to feed get really difficult.

This. I threw in the towel on the pumping fight not too long after I went back to work, but for me there was the added layer of failure associated with the pump - my daughter was kind of lazy at first, and I was really full so we ended up using a pump to get things going for her.

I never shook the feeling of being a not-successful-milk-cow associated with the pump. That, and the kid is generally waaaay more efficient at draining the tank.

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