Absolutely not. Not by me, or anyone else in this thread. Here are some equivalent (to me) things that I *haven’t *said here and don’t believe: “The mother of that diabetic child on insulin hasn’t tried hard enough.” “The father of that kid with the broken leg using crutches hasn’t tried enough.” “That parent who adopted their child and isn’t a bone marrow match hasn’t tried hard enough.” Those are all ridiculous, right? So is it ridiculous to say a mother who can’t produce or express milk hasn’t tried hard enough. Not being able to produce or express milk is a medical issue and formula should absolutely be used in such a case …which is what I *did *say.
A few other things to keep in mind - by 5 months, your breasts have gotten used to the job. It’s easy to think that your supply is lessening, but really it’s learned to adjust. You don’t wake up with them filled with milk because they’ve finally gotten the hint that it’s not needed. If she nurses less often, they should still adjust ok. You can always keep an eye on diapers if you are worried your milk is drying up.
Even if she is wholly embracing solids, she still needs to drink. And provided you don’t give her other drinks, she will have that incentive to nurse. Some babies do more of their nursing at night once they get busier and more interested in the world around them. One of the things that helped with mine was when they were old enough to sit on my lap and nurse while sitting, rather than cradled where they just had the ceiling to look at.
Given that you sound like you want to keep trying, I will say that another good reason (IMO) to keep going is winter illnesses. I’ve always been so relieved when I could nurse mine through a bad fever or tummy bug. For that reason alone I’d try to keep going for several more months.
But what about the mom who can express enough, but she has to put the price to rent the pump on her credit card every month, and decides that it’s not worth the total cost she’s going to have to pay when all is said and done–has she tried hard enough? What about the woman who can express enough, but it means that she gets at most three hours of sleep a night instead of five, and she finally decides she doesn’t want to be quite that miserable or incoherent? What about the woman who can express enough, but she’s spending fully a quarter of her workday on the pump, and knows she’s losing personal and professional respect as she leave a ton of her work undone for her coworkers to pick up? When she decides to quit expressing, has she done enough? What about the woman who can express enough, but it means leaving the lion’s share of childcare to her husband, because she’s on the pump all the time, and she decides she’d rather give the baby formula and get to spend more time bonding/playing/holding the child: has she tried enough?
Woman who can’t breastfeed are perhaps insulated from the guilt, but those women are few and far between. The vast middle is women who could breastfeed, but only at some extraordinary cost. The advantages of breastfeeding are real, but they aren’t so overwhelmingly dramatic that they are worth paying any price for: it’s a trade-off, and at times a difficult choice, but there are many cases where continuing to breastfeed is the wrong choice, even when it’s technically possible. These are the woman who feel just overwhelming guilt, who fear their reasoning is just sophistry and that really they are just selfish and lazy. Telling these woman that “Well, if you can’t, that’s fine, but if at all possible, keep going” is cruel. Better is “Here’s the information. Do what’s best”.
I realize this is a polarizing topic, but it doesn’t have to be. In real life I haven’t nursed in front of a restaurant full of strangers, but in front of friends and family I haven’t hesitated (openly in my own home, in a corner with a scarf in others) and it invites comments. Besides my mother, only one other friend nursed, all the healthy, strong, smart friends and family around me were raised on formula. Comments I’ve heard “I tried, but got thrush and I couldn’t nurse with cracked, bleeding nipples.” “I had to go back to work and never got the hang of the pump.” “Isn’t formula better because of all the added nutrients?” “I have big breasts that people have been staring at since I was ten. No way I could share them with the world.” To which I’ve replied “I’m home with her, and this works for us. Look how happy and healthy she is.” They have to agree, and they drop it.
Except my husband’s huge family. They are disgusted by nursing, and incredibly jealous of the bond baby and I have. They seem to think that the baby, like the family dog, will prefer the company of the person who feeds her. They have slipped her formula. They argue with me about the benefits of science. They successfully weaned the nephew’s baby by convinced the baby’s mother she wasn’t making enough milk, and within one month of taking the baby out of her arms and feeding formula, mom’s milk dried up. She’ll go to her grave convinced she failed at nursing because she couldn’t make enough. Pro formula people are relentless, and in the case of my baby’s in law family: use it as a tool to control baby.
This strange battle is ugly, unnecessary; ridiculous. We need to support each other and offer experience and advice free of judgments and manipulation, but that may take awhile. I don’t feel like I get that ugliness here. Misunderstandings, but not hate. This is constructive. Breastfeeding doesn’t work for everyone, because everyone can’t stay home with the baby. Or because the birth was traumatic. And the emotional connection to let-down is tricky to impossible with a pump. So many things in the modern world make nursing difficult. Breast is best; that’s a fact, not a slogan. Formula works, too; that’s a fact, but as a slogan it won’t sell much juice.
I’m going to keep this baby on the breast for at least a year, and the only thing I want credit for is the determination with which I fought back against the pro-formula brigade AKA the in laws with an agenda. This goes both ways, and the discussion needs to continue so we understand each other, but we’re on the same team. Team Baby.
I really appreciate the advice and reassurance here, and I’m sorry feelings get hurt.I’m new at this Mommy thing and I’ll take all the help I can get.Nursing before solids three times now, and it’s working. She’s eating a bit less solids, but still enjoying herself. This will work.
I agree - you seem to be doing things right.
But since this appears to be your first baby, I will offer a piece of unsolicited advice - you are going to get lots of unsolicited advice. Smile, nod politely, and then do whatever you think is right.
Regards,
Shodan
And no one should feel guilty about that. They should feel betrayed. They should be pissed off. They should be outraged and rioting in the streets because in this day and age “supporting breastfeeding” means we don’t give out free formula in a hospital. That’s not supporting breastfeeding. Supporting breastfeeding is a paid 12 month maternity leave and a hospital pump and lactation consultant paid for by insurance (including Medicaid). Supporting breastfeeding is comfortable nursing places in all public buildings where infants are allowed, and private places to pump at work and time to do it in. Supporting breastfeeding is maintaining well stocked milkbanks of human milk available at the same cost as formula, so that formula isn’t the only option for women who can’t produce or pump. Supporting breastfeeding is creating a culture in which no one stares at a nursing baby on the bus or calls her mother disgusting. We are a million miles and many years from actually supporting breastfeeding in our country, at least in my part of it.
Yes, absolutely, I agree. But my whole point is that people are NOT getting the information in an honest way. Most women get no information at all unless they seek it out. Doctors ask “are you breastfeeding or bottlefeeding?” and they check their check box and move on to a question about another topic. During my OB rotation, we were expressly *forbidden *by hospital policy from providing education on breastfeeding. If a mom asked, we were to ask the doctor to order a consultation with the lactation consultant. So a mom who just wants the information and already has a baby in her arms has to wait hours or days for it, and meanwhile has a terrible latch and her nipples are starting to crack, and she’s left with the impression that her doctors and nurses don’t consider this terribly important, except for this one specialist she only meets once for an hour (who she also suspects may be one of those weird nipplenazi LLL folks she’s heard about, because she sure seems invested in this nursing thing way out of proportion to everyone else…) Yet this was a hospital, like many, crowing about how they were “supporting breastfeeding” because they didn’t give out free formula to take home…unless the mom asked for one of the bags in the stockroom full of formula samples. It’s still there, it’s still available…you just have to ask for it now.
And even when we do have a pamphlet to hand them with the “benefits of breastfeeding,” it’s a methodological mess. (And this is all in that essay I linked to earlier, so if you’ve read that and still don’t agree, I don’t think I can say it any clearer than she can.)
When we teach people about smoking, we tell them how smoking will hurt them. Not-smoking is the normal. The rates of cancer and heart disease and COPD are all presented as the variation from the norm of not smoking - “Smoking raises the risk of lung cancer.” When we teach people about the dangers of obesity, we use normal weight as the baseline, and rates of diabetes and heart disease and vascular damage are all presented as variation from the norm of being normal weight. Only for formula feeding do we present it backwards: formula fed is the unspoken “normal”. Breastfeeding, we’re told, gives us “advantages” and “benefits”. This is not how science is done!
[QUOTE=Breastfeeding]
Health comparisons use a biological, not cultural, norm, whether the deviation is harmful or helpful. Smokers have higher rates of illness; increasing prenatal folic acid may reduce fetal defects. Because breastfeeding is the biological norm, breastfed babies are not “healthier;” artificially-fed babies are ill more often and more seriously. Breastfed babies do not “smell better;” artificial feeding results in an abnormal and unpleasant odor that reflects problems in an infant’s gut. We cannot expect to create a breastfeeding culture if we do not insist on a breastfeeding model of health in both our language and our literature.<snip>
Nowhere is the comfortable illusion of bottlefed normalcy more carefully preserved than in discussions of cognitive development. When I ask groups of health professionals if they are familiar with the study on parental smoking and IQ (1), someone always tells me that the children of smoking mothers had “lower IQs.” When I ask about the study of premature infants fed either human milk or artificial milk (2), someone always knows that the breastmilk-fed babies were “smarter.” I have never seen either study presented any other way by the media–or even by the authors themselves. Even health professionals are shocked when I rephrase the results using breastfeeding as the norm: the artificially-fed children, like children of smokers, had lower IQs.
Inverting reality becomes even more misleading when we use percentages, because the numbers change depending on what we choose as our standard. If B is 3/4 of A, then a is 4/3 of B. Choose A as the standard, and B is 25% less. Choose B as the standard, and A is 33 1/3% more. Thus, if an item costing 100 units is put on sale for "25% less,"the price becomes 75. When the sale is over, and the item is marked back up, it must be marked up 33 1/3% to get the price up to 100. Those same figures appear in a recent study (3), which found a “25% decrease” in breast cancer rates among women who were breastfed as infants. Restated using breastfed health as the norm, there was a 33-1/3% increase in breast cancer rates among women who were artificially fed. Imagine the different impact those two statements would have on the public.
[/QUOTE]
So yes, I agree, give people the information! *Really *give them the information, though. Give them the information in an honest way, in the same format we give out other health information. That’s all I’m trying, in this little corner of the world, to do. And I’m sorry that it makes it seem like I’m trying to make people feel guilty because they’ve gotten misleading information before. It would seem more logical for those people to be angry with those who give them the misleading information and inadequate support.
[QUOTE=ibid]
Most of us have seen well-informed mothers struggle unsuccessfully to establish breastfeeding, and turn to bottlefeeding with a sense of acceptance because they know they did their best. And we have seen less well-informed mothers later rage against a system that did not give them the resources they later discovered they needed. Help a mother who says she feels guilty to analyze her feelings, and you may uncover a very different emotion. Someone long ago handed these mothers the word “guilt.” It is the wrong word.
Try this on: You have been crippled in a serious accident. Your physicians and physical therapists explain that learning to walk again would involve months of extremely painful and difficult work with no guarantee of success. They help you adjust to life in a wheelchair, and support you through the difficulties that result. Twenty years later, when your legs have withered beyond all hope, you meet someone whose accident matched your own. “It was difficult,” she says. “It was three months of sheer hell. But I’ve been walking [ever] since.” Would you feel guilty?
Women to whom I posed this scenario told me they would feel angry, betrayed, cheated. They would wish they could do it over with better information. They would feel regret for opportunities lost. Some of the women said they would feel guilty for not having sought out more opinions, for not having persevered in the absence of information and support. But gender-engendered guilt aside, we do not feel guilty about having been deprived of a pleasure. The mother who does not breastfeed impairs her own health, increases the difficulty and expense of infant and child rearing, an dismisses one of life’s most delightful relationships. She has lost something basic to her own well-being. What image of the satisfactions of breastfeeding do we convey when we use the word “guilt”?
Let’s rephrase, using the words women themselves gave me: “We don’t want to make bottlefeeding mothers feel angry. We don’t want to make them feel betrayed. We don’t want to make them feel cheated.” Peel back the layered implications of “we don’t want to make them feel guilty,” and you will find a system trying to cover its own tracks. It is not trying to protect her. It is trying to protect itself. Let’s level with mothers, support them when breastfeeding doesn’t work, and help them move beyond this inaccurate and ineffective word.
[/QUOTE]
If a person breaks a hip, we expect their health insurance (including Medicare or Medicaid) to provide surgery, therapy and whatever ambulation aids they need to recover. We expect their employer to give them some time off to heal and to make reasonable accommodations to their work place so they can continue to do their job when they come back. And if that doesn’t happen, we tell them they should be pissed off at their doctor for not ordering physical therapy, and they’ve been betrayed by their insurance company who won’t cover the cost and they should call a lawyer because what their employer is trying to do to them isn’t right. Why do we expect any less for mothers who can’t breastfeed? (Answer: because formula companies successfully convinced us all that formula feeding is normal and breastmilk is a “bonus”.)
Exactly.
Fantastic to hear. But you’re in a bit of trouble, m’dear…a whole thread inspired by your baby and still no pictures?! 
(bolding mine)
Oh, now these people are stone cold assholes. Whoever did that should never get to hold the baby again. They should all be cut off from ever being alone with the child without your supervision otherwise you can expect the next ten years to be one long fight with them going behind your back all the time.
Yep. That and the threats to pierce her ears for her first birthday present are the reasons I don’t leave her alone with her other grandmother. And the reason I asked opinions on how to cope with this family who loves the baby, but have different ideas about how to show love. I got great advice in that thread, too. And I’ve only got 18 years to go!
One really important piece of information people need and which I have never seen provided by any one on any side of the issue is the relative importance of breastfeeding. Is it worth ruining your professional standing for? I am not being snarky here: there are things it’s worth ruining your professional reputation for, and things that are not. Are the benefits of breastfeeding in that category? Is it worth not physically bonding with your baby because you are on the pump so much? Is it worth being miserable every single day, if it’s a tolerable level of misery: not the sort of thing where you want to commit suicide or are at risk for snapping and shaking the baby, but the kind of low-level misery where your memories of the first six months of the baby’s life are all of the grind and the exhaustion and the pump, with the giggles and the peek-a-boos being in the background? These are sincere questions, and I’ve never seen anyone give a new mom any sort of perspective from which to make an intelligent choice. It’s just "Well, if you want the best for your baby, the damages of formula are real . . . "
In the world we live in today, the decision on whether or not to continue breastfeeding often comes down to weighing the suffering and discomfort of the mother against the damages of formula. Whether or not that should be the case, and whoever is to blame, for millions of women, that’s the equation. But are those damages like not-putting-your-kid-in-a-carseat bad? Because I’d put up with a lot of pain and suffering before I’d take that kind of risk with my baby’s health. Or are they like “Letting a two year old watch two hours of TV a day” bad, in which case, I wouldn’t spend more than an hour a day on the pump to avoid it.
When my sister had her daughter, she had low supply. She worked with three different lactation consultants. They all agreed that she had low supply. They all counseled her to nurse and then pump every 2 hours around the clock, and to continue doing that indefinitely. That’s how Stalin tortured people. You can’t go weeks and weeks–let alone months and months–without ever sleeping more than an hour at a stretch, which is what the nurse/pump every two hours schedule demanded. But they all just said 'Keep it up as long as you can. This is really important". No one ever gave her any parameters, any guidelines to make an informed choice. It was just “really important” and “Try as hard as you possibly can”. Try like I’d try to get my kid out of a burning building, or try like I’d try to read to him every day? To me, this is the crucial bit of information that would give women meaningful control over their own bodies, and it’s never part of the discussion.
I used to be much more militant about breastfeeding (I hate the word “militant” but it’s sort of what I was) and then my sister had her baby. She tried, she really did. I don’t think she could have tried harder. And after several weeks of nightmarish feedings and not enjoying her baby, she “gave up” (another term I hate) and switched to formula, and the stress level in her household dropped by about a million percent.
I am still very pro-breastfeeding and want to support new mothers who want to breastfeed, and help create a hospital infrastructure that will help and support mothers who want to breastfeed. But I don’t ever want to even imply to another mother that she didn’t try hard enough or that she did something wrong for her child because breastfeeding didn’t work out for whatever reason.
And I think that it is very important to remember that this is an unbelievably emotionally charged issue, and a lot of people feel very damaged and traumatized by their experiences one way or the other, and I think that the most important thing when talking to these people is to validate their experiences and provide a shoulder and a supportive ear, rather than trying to convince them that their deep-seated emotional response is “wrong” somehow.
I think that’s the hardest question to answer, and the one, like all decisions about medical care, that can only be figured out by each family and their doctor…but only after we’re looking at the statistics in the right direction. And no, at the moment, I can’t find that sort of information to give to people. The cultural shift among researchers and people who write study results needs to happen first. But I don’t think it’s going to change much unless we “militant breastfeeding advocates” make a lot of noise and get enough people talking about this that the researchers take notice.
I’m not sure where to even begin with a question like, “is it like not-putting-your-kid-in-a-carseat bad?” How does one compare acute injuries and deaths to decline in IQ, obesity, diabetes, breast cancer and infection risk? Is formula likely to kill your child in one day like a car accident without a car seat? No, of course not. Is it likely to cause long term health deficits that are so ubiquitous that we’ve come to believe they are “normal”, or caused by other factors? Yes.
Assume, for the moment, that the quote above is right and artificially feeding your baby girl raises her breast cancer risk by 33 1/3%.
Smoking increases breast cancer risk by 6%. No one denies that quitting smoking is a good way to reduce your breast cancer risk. Every breast cancer pamphlet out there has “don’t smoke” as a suggestion to keep your risk low. I’ve never seen one with “don’t feed your daughter baby formula” as a suggestion to keep her risk low. But comparing the two, formula raises the risks far more than smoking.
We need more comparisons like that, so people know what they’re choosing. I would be tickled pink if an actuary would run the numbers to give us a clear number for relative risk, 'cause I don’t know how to do that.
MsWhatsit, how wonderful would it have been if, rather than all that stress, your sister could have said, “Well, guess that’s not going to work,” and gone to the milk bank for human milk? Less stress AND the baby gets normal food that doesn’t raise her health risks. Milk banks are the huge silent excluded middle in this discussion. Obviously, it’s too late for your sister, but that’s no reason we shouldn’t try to change things for her daughter or granddaughter someday.
Cite and further explanation for this charge, please.
Here’s an article which gives further information on one study.
Do you have more details on the study you are citing?
As far as I can tell it’s not formula that causes health problems, it’s lack of breast milk, am I right? If so, for everyone saying giving your baby formula should be a last ditch effort to keep them from starving if you can’t breast feed successfully, please take it down a notch.
If a baby can take BM from a bottle because mom’s pumping all the time, then a baby can nurse sometimes and have formula in a bottle the other times and grow up just fine. It’s not rat poison, there are no dangerous chemicals in it, it’s just not breast milk. Adding formula doesn’t hurt your baby, but not giving them any breast milk probably will. So if you’re nursing when you can and supplementing with formula it’s ok and you’re not actually harming your baby.
And I don’t mean supplementing because your supply is low or you’ve tried to pump and it didn’t work or whatever excuse absolves you of blame by the boob nazis, I mean if you need more sleep than a few scattered hours per night or you want dad to take some of the feeding responsibility or you just don’t like hooking a machine up to your breasts or you just want to tuck your damn shirt in for more than ten minutes.
I really do wonder when we’ll all start just giving each other a break already.
TokyoBayer, you’re talking about a whole different thing from WhyNot. You’re talking about what breastfeeding does to the mother’s risk of breast cancer; she’s talking about what it does to the baby girl’s.
I’m citing a reference to it in an essay, linked earlier in the thread. The study was
Freudenheim JL, Marshall JR, Graham S, Laughlin R, Vena JE, Bandera E, et al.
Exposure to breastmilk in infancy and the risk of breast cancer. Epidemiology
1994;5:324–1.
It’s not about women reducing their *own *breast cancer risk by nursing, as yours is, but the risk of breast cancer in women who were themselves breastfed (or not). I cannot find the study itself in electronic format, but another paper references its results as follows:
It also mentions some flaws in the methodology, namely women’s ability to correctly recall if they were breastfed or not, and it’s an old study, so I have no idea if the results have been repeated and/or borne out in the last 18 years. Hence my suggestion that we “Assume, for the moment, that the quote above is right…”
The point of the reference in the article and my own use of it is that a 25% “reduction” in the risk of breast cancer from being breastfed is a misleading way to phrase it. Flip it around to typical risk assessment where the biological norm is the baseline, and being formula fed is associated with a 33.3% increase in developing breast cancer.
Likewise, in the article you linked, it’s phrased, “breastfeeding for a year reduces the risk of breast cancer by 4.3 per cent, the authors said.” Again, in typical fashion, it uses formula feeding as the baseline “normal”. Percentages being what they are, if you flip it around, that means there’s a more than 4.3% *increase *in breast cancer (5%? 7%? I don’t know how to do the math) among women who don’t nurse their infants, if researchers would use breastfeeding as the norm. Yet no one presents it that way.
We present it that way to try to get people to understand the risks of smoking. Why don’t we present it that way to try to get people to understand the risks of formula?
Breastfeeding advocates aren’t against formula moms, they are against the self serving corporations who profit from mothers’ inability to breastfeed. Formula is a godsend and a lifesaver. But make no mistake: formula makers are exploiting the difficulties that can occur with breastfeeding by reassuring moms that formula is interchangeable with the breast. It’s an adequate, nutritive substitute, but breastfeeding is the healthier choice for baby and mom. When it works. For mothers who chose formula, I’m sure you had good reasons. And moms will continue to use formula to raise healthy babies, but I hope it’s because breastfeeding wasn’t an option and not because you bought the hype that formula and the breast are interchangeable.
It’s like weight loss surgery. A patient must lose 100 pounds or risk diabetes and heart disease. She could exercise and diet, or she could have a band inserted to reduce her stomach’s storage capacity. Both options will result in weight loss. Merck makes lap band sound easy, fast, safe. Should we trust that Merck has her best interests at heart? Ultimately, it’s up to the patient to decide, but we hope she goes in armed with honest information, accessible research, and a clear idea of the risk/benefit ratio. The surgery sure is profitable to surgeons, hospitals, and Big Pharma. Should we trust Merck to care about the individual’s long term health? Same for formula makers.
We shouldn’t be at odds with other moms; we should be suspicious of the spin handed to us by pharmaceutical companies.
Absolutely. I for one am militant about helping mothers who want to breastfeed succeed in that goal. I doubt I will ever try to convince a mother who wants to bottle feed that she shouldn’t but if I did, it would only be after we get proper support for breastfeeding mothers from hospitals, doctors, communities, and employers. There’s plenty to fight in those arenas without knocking on doors to evangelize breastfeeding to dedicated Enfamil families!
Damn skippy. The lactation consultant told me it was the right choice. And I’m still too torn up about it to read the fifty posts prior to this one. Stepping out of the thread now…
If you can, share. There are probably other women reading who may share your experience and can benefit from your POV. If baby isn’t thriving or mother is exhausted and stressed by the process, thank goodness formula is available. I’m certainly not judging you or anyone else for raising healthy children. There isn’t a shortcut to saying “formula isn’t better, but it isn’t less, either”. Tranfusions aren’t better than blood, but accidents happen. Water hydrates best, but Kool-aid will work, too. There isn’t a perfect way to phrase it that doesn’t convey some kind of judgment, but sometimes the decision about feeding is out of our hands. If formula were free, we wouldn’t have anything to debate.
As a parent of two small girls, I have to say that there are so damn many things that can go wrong that it’s pointless to stress out about this sort of thing. You do the best you can - whatever that may mean for you and your situation - and take what comes. There’s not a damn person in the world that knows better than you why you do what you do, and it’s not any of their business anyway. Any parent who’s not totally unfit WILL be doing the best that they can for their child. No one has a right to demand you do more.