choosing not to breastfeed

Sometimes breastfeeding just doesn't work out. I understand this. With my first baby, I planned to breastfeed, but didn't know what I was doing and got really bad medical advice. I started giving him supplementary bottles and soon I had a nipple-confused baby and a raging case of mastitis. He was fully on the bottle by three weeks of age.

This story will be familiar to many women. It happens. And sometimes breastfeeding doesn't work out for other, even more legitimate reasons (more legitimate meaning as opposed to my own situation where I certainly was physically capable of nursing my baby had I gotten the right info and support).

After I found myself the mother of a bottle-feeding baby, I began reading more about breastfeeding, the politics of breastfeeding, etc and realized that I had been given TERRIBLE medical advice. Example: Henry-an otherwise perfectly healthy baby - lost 7 ozs in the first few days after birth. The doctor told me this was because I wasn't making enough milk and told me to start supplementing with forumula. Of course, this si ridiculous. The correct advice would be to tell me to relax, this is a normal weight loss for a newborn, and get him to nurse even more often and as long as he wanted.

The information that doctors routinely give women this stupid advice was radicalizing to me. And here I am, 14 years later, a breastfeeding activist. I successfully nursed my next two babies for several years each and I've written one book and many articles about breastfeeding.


My response - to become an activist - was somewhat unusual. My anecdotal impression is that most women who stop breastfeeding early for whatever reason become apologists for the medical profession and defensive about their choice to bottle-feed. They begin to imagine some huge breastfeeding conspiracy out to shame and belittle them for their decision not to nurse. And periodically, a woman in this position writes another ARTICLE LIKE THIS ONE in which she rails against the "militant breastfeeders."

Sigh.

I believe these articles are written from a deeply painful place. I know first hand how disappointing it is to want to nurse a baby and not have it work out. I know it's an uncomfortable feeling to be the only woman feeding her baby a bottle in a park playground full of other women nursing their own babies. It's hard. But to extrapolate from that that all the breastfeeding moms are being nasty to you or that the medical profession is "bullying" women into nursing is absurd.

If the meds are so good at "bullying" women into nursing, why are breastfeeding rates so pitifully low in this country and countries like England? Despite what you may have heard or may THINK you observe when you look around and see the (white, college educated) woman of your acquaintance nursing their kids, the fact is that fewer than 25% of all American babies receive any breastmilk at all past the first few months. In some areas of the country, like mine (I live in East Tennessee), some populations of women - low income, minority -- have breastfeeding rates so low they barely register.

The worst thing at all about these anti-breastfeeding rants by women for whom nursing didn't work out is that they often take it a step further, as this writer did, and try to make the case that the health-promoting aspect of breastfeeding is overblown or negligible. In fact, a growing body of peer reviewed medical research reveals that breastfeeding is one of the most crucial aspects of infant-maternal wellbeing.