In a brilliant deduction, lactivist Prof. Amy Brown has come to the amazing conclusion that women who are bullied by lactivists are harmed by the bullying.
There’s a simple solution to the problem: lactivists could stop using lies about breastfeeding — specifically the claim that insufficient breastmilk is rare and the massively exaggerated claims of benefits — to bully new mothers.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]It is the breastfeeding industry that is bullying women and the breastfeeding industry that must stop.[/pullquote]
Nah. That might require someone like Brown to take responsibility for her own bullying and she enjoys it too much to much to stop. Instead she has euphemized bullying, turning it into “breastfeeding trauma.” And I’ll give you three guesses what she thinks is the cure.
Good for you, you got it on one: that’s right, more breastfeeding support from breastfeeding professionals.
Brown is now traveling the world with a new lecture series. The title betrays her bias at the outset: “Breastfeeding Trauma? How can we recognize and support women who were unable to meet their goals?”
The real question is: how can we stop lactivists from bullying new mothers? But that would require taking responsibility for bullying tactics. Brown would prefer to dump responsibility on new mothers for feeling bad about inability to meet “their breastfeeding goals,” when it is the breastfeeding industry that has created and relentlessly promoted those goals.
Brown displays her dogmatism at the outset:
The goal is not the preservation of infant health, nor the preservation of women’s mental health. The goal is always and only to promote breastfeeding.
Brown’s research is spot on when it comes to identifying the feelings of women who could not meet relentless lactivist pressure to breastfeed:
Who’s to blame for these feelings of guilt, failure and shame? Everybody in the universe except the lactivists that applied the outsize pressure in the first place, grossly exaggerating the benefits, and lying about the the nearly 15% incidence of insufficient breastmilk among first time mothers.
It’s the patriarchy!
It’s capitalism!
It’s society!
It’s the formula industry!
But those can’t be the causes because breastfeeding “trauma” is new and the patriarchy, capitalism, society and the formula industry have been around for hundreds of years.
What has changed? The emergence of a profession that monetizes breastfeeding and applies tremendous pressure to breastfeed while simultaneously lying about the failure rate and exaggerating the benefits. It is the breastfeeding industry that is bullying women and the breastfeeding industry that must stop.
In my view, this is the most important slide in Brown’s deck:
It is meant to illustrate the failure of British women to meet breastfeeding goals, but it inadvertently shows something else: that lactivists exaggerate the benefits of breastfeeding to bully women.
Ghana is the country with the best breastfeeding record. In 2015 the infant mortality rate of those breastfed babies was 43.1/1000. The UK is the country with the worst breastfeeding rate. The infant mortality rate of those formula fed babies was 3.6/1000. The country with the best breastfeeding rate had an infant mortality rate 1000% HIGHER than the country with the worst breastfeeding rate. In other words, breastfeeding has virtually nothing to do with infant health.
If Amy Brown really wanted to reduce breastfeeding trauma, she would share that information with new mothers, but that will never happen. The truth is that in industrialized countries it doesn’t really matter to your baby whether or not you breastfeed; it only matters to the breastfeeding industry.
