Lactation professional Amy Brown has written a new book about breastfeeding grief and trauma. She has also inadvertently demonstrated a variant of it. Brown is not grieving the ability to breastfeed; she’s grieving the loss of status of the breastfeeding profession. Brown and her colleagues are steadily (and thankfully) losing ground to the Fed Is Best movement.
Her response is a combination of denial and anger. Not coincidentally, these are the first two stages of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief.
How does “fed is best” hurt women who want to breast any more than “breast is best” hurts them and everyone else?
Her new piece is a perfect illustration. Titled Don’t Tell me Fed is Best. My Body SHOULD be Able to Breastfeed!, it’s basically an extended temper tantrum. And it’s a temper tantrum that can only be thrown by the massively privileged. It’s like claiming you are entitled to have a child of a chosen gender. Sure it could happen and if you have enough children it is likely to happen. But you’re not entitled to it.
Brown starts with a bizarre claim:
Telling a woman that ‘the main thing is that your baby is fed’ can seem like their feelings and experiences, particularly their right for their body to work as expected, are being dismissed.
Actually, for loving mothers, the main thing IS that their baby is fed. Most loving mothers put their babies’ well being ahead of their feelings. After all, for years that’s what they have been counseled to do by lactation professionals. When Brown and colleagues declare “breast is best,” they assume that every mother wants to give her baby what is best. When they encourage (and often pressure) women to ignore their own pain, exhaustion and depression, they imply that the purported benefits to the baby eclipse any suffering for the mother. How ironic that lactation professionals can’t accept when women discover that fed is best for THEIR babies.
Brown continues:
What about the women who really wanted to breastfeed?
But challenging the use of the ‘fed is best’ message is not about implying that every woman can or should want to breastfeed. It’s about fighting for justice for those women who really wanted to breastfeed, but encountered difficulties, only to find that the thing they were told was so important during pregnancy, suddenly didn’t seem to be anymore. For them the message can hurt – and it’s important we listen to what they are saying.
Justice? Seriously? Are women who wanted to breastfeed but can’t more entitled to justice than women who didn’t want to breastfeed but feel pressured to do so?
“Fed is best” hurts women who wanted to breastfeed? How? Or — more to the point — how does “fed is best” hurt them any more than “breast is best” hurts them and everyone? Judging by the soaring popularity of the fed is best movement, “breast is best” is hurting hundreds of thousands of women and their babies. Where is the concern for their feelings and their physical and mental health?
Brown has closed her eyes and ears to the desperate entreaties of the women that the fed is best movement supports.
As usual, Brown plays fast and loose with the truth:
A further kick for these women, is that breastfeeding doesn’t have to be like this. If you look at breastfeeding rates in other countries they are much higher. Take Norway for example – whilst over three quarters of women there are breastfeeding at six months, just a third are in the UK.
But only 2.1% of Norwegian mothers are breastfeeding exclusively at 6 months. Only 2.1% in the country that Brown lauds for their breastfeeding support.
Perhaps the reason more women in the UK aren’t doing so is that British (and American) lactation professionals fetishize exclusivity and imply that supplementation of any kind “invalidates” breastfeeding. When you demonize supplementation, you imply (or even state) that “just one bottle” of formula means that there is no point in breastfeeding any longer.
But the bottom line for lactation professionals is always money for themselves and their services. Amy Brown is no exception:
…[I]f we are led to believe that breastfeeding doesn’t matter and we shouldn’t mind how our baby is fed, then this reduces pressure on governments and health services to make the investments needed to better support women.
That’s right! In industrialized countries breastfeeding DOESN’T matter for term babies and governments and health services have received NO return on the multi-million dollar investment in breastfeeding they’ve made so far. Brown is in the UK, where breastfeeding rates are literally the lowest in the world and the result has been … one of the best infant mortality rates in the world!
Unfortunately, breastfeeding support has become a gravy train for lactation professionals and they can never get enough money or employment opportunities. “Breast is best” is their marketing slogan and they are angry and in denial about the fact that their preeminence is coming to an end.
Follow the money! Fed is best might hurt lactation professionals, but its soaring popularity is testament to the fact that it helps mothers and babies. Isn’t that what justice requires?
