Let the lactivist whining begin!
I wrote yesterday that the Royal College of Midwives issued a statement of what should have been obvious all along:
Bottle feeding is a woman’s right
New mothers ‘should not be shamed into breastfeeding’
Bottle feeding mothers’ ‘choice must be respected’ midwives advised
Prof. Amy Brown, like most professional lactivists, is upset that her unfettered ability to mentally torture new mothers by locking up formula, making women sign formula consents and refusing to provide information about bottle feeding has been curtailed.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Should women believe their own feelings of midwife induced pressure, shame and guilt, Amy Brown, or you?[/pullquote]
She expresses her frustration in a new piece What are women’s ‘rights’ when it comes to infant feeding? I notice that Prof. Brown puts the word rights in quotes implying from the start that women don’t really have any rights to control their own breasts.
But even worse, Prof. Brown appears to believe that women have no right to tell their own stories of mental torture to the press.
The right for the media to not sensationalise women’s experiences to make money.
…[W]omen do not deserve those headlines. Many a woman in my research has talked about how they hate and blame themselves, feeling like failures. Equally, many a woman has struggled on breastfeeding, through pain, confusion, exhaustion… because she couldn’t get the support she needs.
And the media thinks this is news? Heartbreak is not news. It is not there to sell papers. The only thing it is there for is to learn from and to move forward. And no one does that by stirring up layers and layers of deep hurt.
That would be hilarious if it weren’t so hypocritical. Brown has spent that last years using the media to publicly bewail the “lack of support” for breastfeeding, including:
Low UK breastfeeding rates down to social pressures over routine and sleep sensationalizing the selfishness of new mothers who want to get sleep to recover from childbirth.
Why Fed Will Never Be Best: The FIB Letting Our New Mothers Down sensationalizing the purported lack of support for breastfeeding and bitterly mocking women who have insufficient breastmilk by obnoxiously and falsely asserted that insufficient breastmilk is rare when it is quite common (up to 15% of first time mothers in the first few days after birth).
The breathtakingly hypocritical Don’t We Deserve Fairer Priced Formula Milks? arguing in direct opposition to basic economics that the Thewlis Bill, further restricting formula advertising in the UK, would lower the cost of formula. That’s like the anti-abortion crowd claiming that restrictive abortion laws are designed to improve the safety of pregnancy termination.
But when it comes to sensationalization, it’s hard to top Brown’s March 2018 piece Baby bottle propping isn’t just dangerous – it’s a sign of a broken society
Should women believe their own feelings of midwife induced pressure, shame and guilt, Amy Brown, or you?
Importantly, midwives do not deserve these headlines either. I have never met a midwife who has judged or criticised a woman for not breastfeeding. I have met plenty a midwife who has worked through breaks and past end of shifts to sit with a woman in pain and distress.
Brown is nothing if not an expert in gaslighting:
Those headlines are designed to do one thing – to turn women against each other, to cause arguments, to distract. They are designed to push women towards formula companies and away from each other. They are designed to divide and cause people to spend time debating a non-debate. They are designed to turn women against midwives, to turn midwives against their organisation. In other words, to cause havoc that privileges one group only – the formula industry.
Really? All those women who are telling their stories of mental distress over breastfeeding are attempting to turn women against each other and push women toward formula companies? You can’t be serious, Prof. Brown.
Gill Walton the head of the RCM wants only to turn women against midwives and to turn midwives against their organization? Are you for real, Prof. Brown?
Brown’s reveals her true obsession with this statement:
Every time we fight with each other. Every time we get distracted. Every time we fall into a trap of having to endlessly defend – they win.
While Brown may view everything through the prism of a battle to the death between lactivists and formula companies, the rest of us are concerned about BABIES.
That’s right, Prof. Brown, babies; you remember them? I can’t be sure since you didn’t bother to mention their needs at all. And that just proves the point I have been making for years: lactivism is not about babies and what they need; it’s about lactivists and how they wish to see themselves. They imagine themselves as superior mothers battling the forces of the formula industry and emerging victorious when the reality is that they are women who were lucky enough to face fewer breastfeeding problems than others and are battling for personal self-esteem, professional marketing share, and economic enrichment through greater employment opportunities.
Brown finishes with a flourish of lactivist sanctimony:
Enough of the stirring. There are no ‘sides’. We’re all fighting for the same things. More investment, more support, more value. Let’s stop the media from trying to pretend otherwise.
Sorry, Prof. Brown, there are sides and you’ve placed yourself squarely on the wrong one:
There are women on one side and lactation professionals who think they know better on the other.
There are hungry babies, babies suffering from hypoglycemia, kernicterus, and hypernatremic neonatal dehydration on one side and lactation professionals denying their suffering on the other.
There are mothers who want only to do what is best for their babies on one side and lactation professionals who refuse to listen to them, who lie about the natural failure rate of breastfeeding and who promote a process — breastfeeding — above the physical health of babies and the mental health of mothers on the other.
Fed Is Best. Fed Is Feminist. Offering lactivist “support” that women don’t want is neither.
