For me, a perfect storm sustains our harmful “breast is best” approach: naturalistic fallacy, trad wifery, demonisation of formula milk, medical misogyny, dismissing women’s experiences, sloppy science… Not helpful to blame left or right - all of these need to be tackled!
Exclusively breast feeding can be both dangerous and impossible.
The left knows this but perpetuates the myth that only exclusive breastfeeding is good enough.
New mothers are bullied mercilessly into believing it is the only option.
If you don’t - or can’t - breast feeding you are told you are “harming your baby”.
No new mother wants to harm her baby.
So they persevere, even when it’s clear that breastfeeding is not (for whatever reason) working.
Even when breastfeeding is harming their baby.
One of my friends had a baby with undiagnosed tongue tie.
He couldn’t latch but she sat for days, both of them crying, because she had been told a responsible mother would not give their baby formula. He ended up back in hospital having lost over 10% of his birth weight.
I had no problems with my first, but my second was premature and in NICU. So I expressed for six months.
I had to buy a new freezer to store milk as she was so small, I was initially making more than she could have.
A health visitor came round when she was 3 months old and back from hospital.
Accusingly she said “what are you feeding her”. She didn’t believe I’d battled through expressing so I showed her the freezer, full of small bottles of milk.
She stared at my chest and said “you don’t look like you could”. I’ve never been well endowed but she should know breast size has nothing to do with milk production. It stung. It stung even more knowing that I had been crying in pain, sadness and frustration over a pump every 4 hours for 3 months so my baby had enough milk as she grew.
With my third, I had hyperthyroidism which goes into abeyance in pregnancy but came back with a vengeance shortly after he was born and I had to go back onto medication to control it. I couldn’t breast feed from 3 weeks. He thrived anyway.
The left demonised formula back in 1970s. Early campaigns were spearheaded by socialist and left-leaning groups, such as the UK charity War on Want and the Swiss Third World Action Group, which framed the issue around multinational corporate exploitation of developing nations.
In the 1980s the Greens, Lib Dem’s and trade unions supported the boycott of Nestle for selling baby formula.
The global left captured international bodies such as WHO which pushed the anti-formula agenda onto weak national governments.
For decades, mothers and babies have paid the price for leftist, anti capitalism propaganda.
Is breast milk great? yes. Is formula crucial for many? yes.
Tongue tie, low milk production, illness, medicine, technique: all can prevent exclusively breast feeding from being possible.
Stop demonising mothers for wanting the best for their babies.
Stop making babies pay the price for political ideology.View quoted post on X
