Another horrible article disputing breastfeeding benefits - Page 3

[beatee]

Originally Posted by teale

Grr. The unfortunate thing is, most people don't research to find out where these links and studies come from, so they don't see the bias from the writer and those involved.

Yuck.

Plus (and probably even more pertinently), there are hundreds of thousands of women who are just waiting for someone who sounds clever and uses studies and big words to tell them that breastfeeding isn't that great so they needn't bother-its exactly what they want to hear, and we very rarely question what we want to hear!

I accidentally revisited a forum I used to post on full of 'intelligent free thinking(*cough* privileged American middle class) women. Man they loved the Roisin article. So many reactions of 'this totally validates my choices, the benefits are all so overblown, breastfeeding fascists etc.' And so many pregnant women expressing how thankful they were to read something that is going to enable them to 'take a relaxed attitude to breastfeeding the new baby' (ie. stop after 2 days if it's a bit uncomfortable)....aaagh. Oh, and then the discussion turned to the way that doctors are pushing breastfeeding because they're trying to force women back into the home and out of the workplace....Hmmm. Yeah....

Honestly I really do believe in freedom of choice and I don't believe breastfeeding will work for everyone, and I don't believe those who it doesn't work for should be made to feel bad. Damn, i don't even like it, so I can't be too outraged at others who don't. But it blows my mind how supposedly intelligent women are so willing to accept interpretations of scientific data made by people with acknowledged personal bias and no medical background over the conclusions by leading medical authorities made after extensive reviews of all available evidence...oh yes, it's because the doctors are trying to force us back into the home, of course.... (oops, i've been breastfeeding nearly 2 years and managed to [almost-in a few weeks time] complete my degree and start a career in that time....yikes). And it also makes me mad that people just refuse to acknowledge that there is any other reality than their middle class bubble....

[spughy]

Originally Posted by beatee

Plus (and probably even more pertinently), there are hundreds of thousands of women who are just waiting for someone who sounds clever and uses studies and big words to tell them that breastfeeding isn't that great so they needn't bother-its exactly what they want to hear, and we very rarely question what we want to hear!

I think you've hit on a key point though - it's certainly true that there is a lack of support for breastfeeding, but we need to realize that a huge proportion of moms don't breastfeed because they don't want to. If we can change that part - and peer pressure is one of the best ways, if all the cool kids are doing it, everyone else will too - employers and legislation will fall into line. Sadly the media remains disingenuous about its role in social change (and, too, the media is merely human at the bottom of it all, and prone to corruption and just plain old idiocy.) If EVERY show with a family in it showed babies breastfeeding, if the View had a mandate to have public health officials come on and give the silly twits a good haranguing every time they started boob-bashing, if Oprah were to use her clout and really push breastfeeding, THAT's what would pass for peer pressure here.

[teale]

Plus (and probably even more pertinently), there are hundreds of thousands of women who are just waiting for someone who sounds clever and uses studies and big words to tell them that breastfeeding isn't that great so they needn't bother-its exactly what they want to hear, and we very rarely question what we want to hear!

Definitely agree.

I also frequent another board, though I now refrain from even typing in the parenting section, who rejoiced over Rosin's article. Forget that she has no clue what sort of science it takes to read a medical journal, or studies, they just lapped up the fact that she was saying, "Breastfeeding isn't all that great! I looked it up on the internets!"

Woman who don't want to breastfeed will search high and low to find validation, even in the poorest forms. These articles, no matter how well written lack one thing- pure information. They are biased, they are not articles, but mainly opinion pieces and should wear a disclaimer as such.

[songbh]

Originally Posted by spughy

it's certainly true that there is a lack of support for breastfeeding, but we need to realize that a huge proportion of moms don't breastfeed because they don't want to. If we can change that part - and peer pressure is one of the best ways, if all the cool kids are doing it, everyone else will too - employers and legislation will fall into line.

That's like saying that if we just apply enough peer pressure and relentless media rhetoric and images of thin people, then overweight people will want to be thin ... and then everything else will fall into line to make them become thin. Unfortunately, that's the world we already live in. It doesn't work, and it's insulting, oversimplistic, and emotionally damaging.

I can't get behind the idea that our job as lactivists is to pressure and harangue women into wanting to breastfeed. I guess I'm enough of a feminist, and have enough respect for an individual woman's authority over her own body and her own life choices, to find these tactics distasteful.

Besides, if you listen to these anti-breastfeeding voices, they're all saying that they wanted to breastfeed and did breastfeed for some period of time, short or long. But it was either an awful experience, as with Ms. Stimson's 2006 Daily Mail article, or they came to perceive it as not worth the work, stress, and inconvenience, as with Ms. Rosin's recent Atlantic article.

My stance on the recent spate of hatin' articles is that while they do contribute to misperceptions about breastfeeding (the science, the basic processes of the breastfeeding relationship), they also reveal the often impossible circumstances in which contemporary mothers are trying -- and therefore failing, often traumatically -- to breastfeed. It's important to acknowledge and deal seriously with this space of lived reality.

If we can look past the stuff that riles us and listen sympathetically to what these mothers are trying to tell us about their experiences, we can learn some valuable lessons about how to make things easier for the next mother -- including, I suggest, respecting her choices even if we don't understand or agree with them.

[proudmomof4]

Originally Posted by songbh

My stance on the recent spate of hatin' articles is that while they do contribute to misperceptions about breastfeeding (the science, the basic processes of the breastfeeding relationship), they also reveal the often impossible circumstances in which contemporary mothers are trying -- and therefore failing, often traumatically -- to breastfeed. It's important to acknowledge and deal seriously with this space of lived reality.

If we can look past the stuff that riles us and listen sympathetically to what these mothers are trying to tell us about their experiences, we can learn some valuable lessons about how to make things easier for the next mother -- including, I suggest, respecting her choices even if we don't understand or agree with them.

Absolutely.
Respect of a mother's choice is an important "ingredient" in that learning process but I feel we are still missing out on information without economical or ideological interests. New mothers need to make sense of a whole lot of contradicting messages and IMO that is a big part of the problem.