I’ve never bought the argument, mysteriously embedded in the ”breast is best” slogan, that ”better mothers breastfeed”, but I’m convinced that this social sub-text has turned discussion on the proposed new regulations relating to foodstuffs for infants into a one-sided rant, blindly supported by the media.
The received wisdom is that the regulations are unworkable, draconian and an assault on freedom of expression and choice. Rubbish.
The regulations are designed to reduce the commercial hype and advertising of baby foods, and to give consumers clear and accurate information on how to use the products. They govern only the manufacturers and prevent unethical advertising, while stipulating that certain warnings and instructions appear on the labels.
If there are informed articles about motives for the regulations, I have not seen them. One journalist’s attempt at balance was to say that the government wanted ”to push the view that exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months, followed by ‘sustained breastfeeding for two years and beyond’, is best for babies and that introducing ‘partial artificial feeding’ threatens a mother’s ability to breastfeed her baby”. These are facts, not ”views”.
Breastfeeding is an issue so caught up in the binding bra straps of myth and misinformation that no one can discuss it calmly.
No one asks, for instance, what the government and breastfeeding advocates have to gain — materially — from restricting advertising of artificial infant food. The answer is that no one, but for the odd wet nurse, would make any money in the unlikely event that breastfeeding became the only way babies were fed.
Manufacturers, on the other hand, have almost everything to lose.
There is no end to, nor ever will be, information on bottle-feeding. Informed material on the mechanics of early breastfeeding, however, is far harder to obtain.
What I would have liked in my little hospital gift pack, along with the futon-sized pads and baby bum cream, would have been a clutch of glossy pamphlets warning me of all the insidious little messages I was about to get about how I can’t breastfeed.
To add to the confusion, the messages most often come from health professionals, who probably believe training courses and research funded by formula manufacturers are based on the industry’s genuine desire for women to breastfeed, rather than buy their products.
It is, for instance, a well-researched and documented fact that infants shouldn’t eat solids before six months. Yet the wording on baby cereals packaging declares that the product can be used ”from four months”. This allows historical wisdom to continue past the emergence of modern research.
It is not hard to work out what the motive would be for getting mothers to start buying baby food two months earlier than is physiologically necessary.
While the hackneyed ”breast is best” idea is widely trumpeted, correct information on how to breastfeed is scarce. If formula makers handed over half of their annual marketing and free samples budget to the underfunded breastfeeding lobby, the playing fields might be level and the regulations unnecessary.
Instead, women are bombarded with hogwash like ”you don’t have enough milk”, or ”bottle babies sleep better”. And in the terrible sleep-deprived haze of the post-partum weeks, we believe anything that promises to make mothering easier.
But when breastfeeding goes awry, we take it personally, believing we are at fault, that something is intrinsically wrong with our ability to lactate, with our very ”womanness”.
Breastfeeding a newborn is difficult for many women. The oft-repeated mantra ”some women can’t breastfeed”, doesn’t help.
Indeed, some women can’t, but it has less to do with physiological factors, than with lack of support, and a health fraternity inadequately schooled in modern lactation management.
What women need in the first few days in hospital is the kind of nurse an acquaintance of mine had, who says: ”Here love, let me show you how your cans work.”
Instead, most of us have to deal with a new slew of nurses every shift, many of whom will declare with authority ”you don’t have milk”, ignorant words that cast a spell of doom on many breastfeeding relationships.
There is a handful of internationally qualified lactation specialists who really do know how to help; who believe so thoroughly in breastfeeding they take midnight calls from sobbing mothers with bleeding nipples. These people don’t get financial kickbacks, fame or column inches.
Why do they believe in breastfeeding? You have to be determined to find out because, unlike formula tins, breasts do not have labels on them listing ingredients. But the information is there, if you really want it. Just as information on options will always be available if you need it. Even if artificial milk producers will have us believe the government is trying to censor them.
Lamentable, really, that large multinational companies — who deal in money, not altruism — are so powerful that women really do believe that breastfeeding is the preserve of the lucky few.
Meanwhile the ever-polite breastfeeding lobby must quietly — so as not to offend anyone — go about undoing the damage of the subliminal messages about our breasts’ incompetence to do what they were designed for.