They think they can ignore the problems they cause.
They refuse to listen to the younger generation they harm.
They imagine that because they hold the power, they don’t have to care.
They’re not boomers; they’re lactivists.
Think deleting and banning your critics is a winning strategy? OK Lactivist!
Tens of thousands of infants are re-hospitalized each year for breastfeeding complications. Shockingly, exclusive breastfeeding has become the leading risk factor for newborn hospital readmission.
A new movement, the Fed Is Best movement, encompassing hundreds of thousands of women has come to prominence for trying to protect babies from dehydration, hyperbilirubinemia, hypoglycemia and other complications of insufficient breastmilk.
How has the breastfeeding profession responded?
Amy Brown has written:
…[T]he phrase ‘fed is best’ is nonsensical. At NO point has anyone ever suggested that if a baby can’t be breastfed then they should starve… Fed is therefore not best, because best implies that there are other acceptable alternatives.
OK lactivist!
Marsha Walker wrote:
Social media has been alight with descriptions of exclusive breastfeeding being dangerous, resulting in significant and severe negative outcomes in infants whose mothers wished to breastfeed. This backlash has been led by a campaign that uses inflammatory anecdotes and misleading and inaccurate interpretation of research to bolster its assault on breastfeeding …
OK Lactivist!
Lucy Ruddle wrote:
So, that study being shared by certain places who like to scaremonger… the “1 in 71 breastfed newborns are readmitted” one… I got hold of it, mainly because I was interested in the limitations, which SOB and FIB have a habit of ignoring.
But Ruddle read the wrong paper, misunderstood what she read and it actually showed an even higher rate of readmission. When confronted with her multiple mistakes, Ruddle deleted the post without correcting her errors and without apologizing for them.
Okay Lactivist!
Serena Meyer wrote:
Have you heard about Fed is Best? It’s an organization that believes that the Baby Friendly Initiative is responsible for pushing breastfeeding in a way that essentially starves babies. There is a lot of carefully cloaked vitriol about breastfeeding and brain damage, starvation and death. It makes me feel pretty argumentative; not about the fact that babies can lose more than we would like, but at the goals of the organization as I perceive them.
When faced with hundreds of comments from women whose babies were starved by aggressive breastfeeding promotion, Meyer deleted them … all of them.
When invited by the Fed Is Best Foundation to respond to their careful recitation and debunking of Meyer’s lies, she responded:
So it looks as though I have an invitation to defend my post on Fed is Best. It will take me a second to respond to it all. But I will. Line by line is going to take time…
But within an hour she was back-pedaling:
Actually. Its pointless and I have christmas cards to write.
OK Lactivist!
You think you can ignore the problems you cause, but you’re wrong.
You refuse to recognize the younger generation you harm and therefore you are undermining the very programs you seek to support
You imagine that because you hold the power at the moment, you don’t have to care about the anguished mothers whose babies have been hospitalized, injured and, in some cases, rendered permanently impaired or even dead.
You’ve made it impossible to have a reasoned discussion because you delete comments, ban those who try to correct your falsehoods and refuse to engage with your critics.
Think that’s a winning strategy?
OK Lactivist!
