Yesterday I wrote about Courtney Jung’s NYTimes op-ed Overselling Breastfeeding.
It’s a fabulous piece and has been shared widely on social media. It’s a frontal assault on the industry of lactivism, which profits by moralizing breastfeeding, grossly exaggerating its benefits, boosting the fragile self-esteem of some mothers at the expense of other mothers, and re-inscribing the privilege of white, relatively well off women by enshrining their parenting choices as normative.
Lactivists are very angry about it, which makes their feeble attempts to respond all the more remarkable.
[pullquote align=”right” color=”#f3ce01″]Stop denying that women feel shamed when you shame them![/pullquote]
It’s almost as if they are not listening to what is being said.
Consider the response from The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine (ABM), the mouthpiece for professional lactivists. It’s entitled Promotion without Support: A Reply to Editorials that Attack Breastfeeding Advocacy by Casey Rosen-Carole, MD, MPH.
I like the title. It’s an explicit acknowledgement that is NOT breastfeeding that is being attacked but the zealous, industry backed efforts to promote breastfeeding. The title is the high point; it’s all downhill from there.
Rather, breastfeeding advocacy today focuses on the social conditions that prevent women around the world from being able to make choices that support their health and empowerment, and the futures of their babies.
That’s shockingly hypocritical. Breastfeeding advocacy focuses on forcing women to choose breastfeeding. There is some attention paid to issues like maternity leave, but the social conditions that are the focus of lactivist efforts are the creation of programs, public health messages and hospital policies that seek to shame women who choose not to breastfeed and to place as many impediments as possible in their way, such as locking up infant formula and forcing women to sign releases acknowledging the superiority of breastmilk before they can obtain formula.
The Orwellian named “Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative” is not friendly to babies and is nakedly cruel to mothers. It is not based on science; there’s no evidence for most of the tenets of the initiative, and the marginal impact is completely oversold.
I will not engage this discourse here, as it is clear from every medical expert panel in every country in the world that the benefits of breastfeeding for health of mother and baby, decreasing economic and health inequities, and supporting a healthy environment, are well established.
Expert medical panels can be and are often wrong, particularly when it comes to dietary recommendations. It is telling that Dr. Rosen-Carole flat out refuses to discuss the actual research (which shows the benefits of breastfeeding in first world countries to be trivial), replacing any evaluation of the scientific evidence with the incredibly paternalistic “just do what we tell you because we know better than you.” I’m not the least bit surprised that Dr. Rosen-Carole refused to discuss the evidence for the purported benefits of breastfeeding. It’s weak, conflicting, riddled with confounders and fails to support nearly every contention of the breastfeeding industry.
I am therefore saddened that media discourse on breastfeeding continues to undermine women by putting forth articles supporting the notion that a battleground exists between mothers…
The conflation of negative social experiences of mothers and breastfeeding advocacy is overstated.
That’s a classic example of “gaslighting,” named after the horror movie Gaslight.
According to Wikipedia:
Gaslighting … is a form of mental abuse in which information is twisted or spun, selectively omitted to favor the abuser, or false information is presented with the intent of making victims doubt their own memory, perception, and sanity. Instances [include] the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred …
Are you a mother who feels like infant feeding has become a battleground where lactivists abuse other women? It’s all in your head.
When this cruelly dismissive attitude was pointed out to Rosen-Carole, she responded with a disingenuous addendum that continued with gaslighting tactic:
Let me be clear: No one is saying this isn’t happening to moms.
Actually, Dr. Rosen-Carole, YOU are saying it isn’t happening to moms. The language you use, referring to the battleground as a “notion,” leave little room for misinterpretation. Moreover, it implicitly calls the reliability and truthfulness of formula feeding mothers into question. They feel it is a battleground where they are being attacked. Who are you to tell them that they are wrong about their own feelings?
And don’t blame the media.
[The media] are too busy with articles that radicalize breastfeeding advocates and dispute the value of breastfeeding.
That’s a tactic that is beloved of political extremists and shouldn’t be used by medical societies. But lactivists are extremists, too, clinging to cherished beliefs in the face of a growing mountain of scientific evidence that undermines those beliefs. When questioned about their claims, lactivists point fingers at everyone else instead of addressing the criticism.
Rosen-Carole concludes with a flourish of shaming:
…[W]e are saving our justified anger for the development of much-needed policies, medical practices and community movements that support women to have the real possibility of making choices that support the health and well-being of their families. The social and media conversation needs to move on as well. Editorials like Jung’s in the ‘Times’ only serve to continue the false conflation of advocacy and social blaming, and the false battleground between mothers.
Making “choices that support the health and well-being of their families.” So formula feeding moms don’t support the health and well-being of families?
Choices? What choice besides breastfeeding is considered acceptable to professional lactivists.
The “false conflation of advocacy and social blaming”?
Let me make this as clear as I can for the folks at The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine. It’s time for them to listen:
Stop denying that women feel attacked when you attack them!
Stop denying that women feel shamed when you shame them!
Stop pretending that their feelings don’t reflect the reality that you have created with your endless hectoring, exaggeration and moralizing!
Jung made some strong empirical claims. Address those claims. Examine your cherished beliefs and adjust them based on the scientific evidence. That’s what physicians and scientists are supposed to do; not retreat into denial and defensiveness.
