Tits and Assholes

Everywhere you turn these days, there's breastfeeding. People shouting about the rights of women to feed their babies wherever they please. People shouting about how disgustingly immoral it is to put a dirty nipple into an innocent baby's mouth. Catchphrases like "breast is best" (which I invariably read as "beast").

Over at Making Light right now there's a post on LiveJournal banning breastfeeding icons, which threatened to erupt into a flamewar before Teresa put a stop to it. She's given the okay to start up the formula feeders are evil child abusers/breast feeders are self-righteous pricks debate in an open thread, but I don't see that ending well. So rather than post flamebait on her blog, I thought I'd finally get around to that post I promised all those months ago.

So, breastfeeding. It seems like all you hear is how great it is, and what a terrigble tragedy it is that women are made to feel shame over "feeding their children the way nature intended." It's wonderful, it's healthier, it makes them smarter, nasty horrible people will try to get you down, but you fight them, girl! Shove your tit down that baby's throat and wave the other one around! Anyone who says you shouldn't breastfeed is attacking the sacred institution of motherhood! Anyone who doesn't breastfeed is uneducated and will have sickly, stupid children!

I heard the pro-breastfeeding propaganda, and I internalized it. Breastfeeding is great! Best thing ever! Nobody's gonna shove me into a bathroom to feed my son! Even more than the natural childbirth messages, or the anti-caesarian messages, I believed the breastfeeding spiel.

And then, you see, it all went wrong.

First, there was the medically-ordered five months of bedrest. My friendly, low-key, family practice doctor muttered about incompetent cervices, did some more ultrasounds, and referred my to a group of high-risk specialists. Stay on the sofa, they said, only up long enough to make a sandwich. 600 miligrams of Ibuprofen at precise six-hour intervals, and ultrasounds every week. I never got to take a prenatal yoga class; hell, I barely got permission to go to the childbirth classes, and those were held in the hospital.

But I did it all. At least I won't have to spend a lot of money on maternity clothes, I told myself, I can just lie around the house in my sweats. I'll improve my mad video game skillz. I'll read. I'll write. I was upbeat in the face of terror and mind-numbing boredom. It's okay. I'm still a good person. It's for the best.

Then I watched my due date pass by, waving and laughing at me from a week and a half ago. Suddenly, I was on my feet again, walking, trying to evict the kid who suddenly didn't want to leave. I answered a never-ending parade of phone calls from people who were certain I'd given birth and just forgotten to tell them. I walked around the neighborhood, trying to ignore the stabbing pain and shortness of breath.

"When do you want to be induced?" my doctor asked, "This baby's getting too big, your blood pressure is too high, we need to get him out of there."

I don't. I don't want this. I've read all the statistics: induction increases the chance that you'll ask for an epidural, which increases the chance that labor will stall, or you won't push effectively, and then it's off to the OR with you to be sliced open. But the risk to both of us from PIH was compelling, and I agreed to an induction, two weeks after my due date. It's okay. I'm still a good person. It's for the best.

And then the pain. The epidural. The failure to progress, the heartrate going down, the caesarian, the infection, the abcess. This is all another post, another rant, but it's important to my point here: my "birth experience" (I hate that term. And shouldn't it be Adam's birth experience, anyway?) was the antithesis of what I had planned and hoped for. It was a little disappointing, but ultimately, it was okay. I didn't mind. And that made it all the more devastating when I nearly starved my son trying to breastfeed.

They call themselves "lactivists," you know, these breastfeeding proponents. It's a loaded word. It implies that breastfeeding is a radical, progressive movement, as though humans, monkeys, and wallabies haven't been doing it since the dawn of time. The implication is that these people are preaching the word, that once we all hear their gospel, we'll know, we'll understand, we'll be enlightened.

Well, lemme tell ya, brothers and sisters, I know. I know all the arguments. Shall we discuss the things people feel free to say? Because, of course, only an utter moron would fail to breastfeed after hearing The Word, so you - you with the bottle in your hand! - you must not have heard. Let me explain.

When my son was two weeks old, we went to a party. He'd just been to zillionth weight check the day before, and he was still dropping. Supplement, the doctor said, this boy needs formula. And I knew I was a failure as a mother. Can't be pregnant right, can't give birth right, can't even feed my kid right. So there I was at a stranger's house, surrounded by people I'd never met, trying not to cry as I struggled to give Adam a bottle of formula, and some woman looked over and shouted, "Oh, just take your shirt off and breastfeed that baby!"

We were in Bellingham, an hour and a half from home, and in any case, Matt was out on a boat in the middle of the lake. I considered throwing the diaper bag at her head, but I'd forgotten to pack my brick that day, and I thought it might rip open my incision. Instead, I forced a smile, and continued my fight to get my son to eat.

But she wasn't done: "Babies never take a bottle well from Mommy; they want the good stuff." My smile was wobbling around the edges, and I was tearing up. In retrospect, I wish I'd torn into her, not because I like behaving that way, but because until the rest of us stand up as doing-the-best-we-can-and-the-hell-with-your-opinions-on-raising-my-child-tivists, people like her will gleefully spout off comments like that and think they're being helpful. It's just that the rest of us don't know, you see.

I've heard that women who've had c-sections have a harder time breastfeeding - our bodies are trying simultaneously to heal, and to provide complete nutrition for a tiny, needy remora. I got people telling me that milk production is supposed to be self-regulating. (Thanks, I had no idea! I must have forgotten to put 'er on auto!)

Well, you know what? It ain't necessarily so. I nursed Adam nearly every hour. In between, I spent 20 - 30 minutes attached to the breast pump, and came up with maybe an ounce for my trouble. I hired an expensive lactation consultant who told me he was getting two ounces per feeding, tops. I had her come out again, for another $250. I saw my acupuncturist. I drank vile teas concocted by the herbalist, and something even viler from the Chinese herbalist. I hauled my water bottle along everywhere.I rented a wildly expensive, seriously industrial breast pump, put up curtains in my cubicle at work, and learned to type while the machine sucked me dry. I got constant blocked ducts - a fabulous condition that left me in bed crying at least once a week.

And still, Adam wasn't gaining enough weight. We added formula when the breast milk ran short. At best, I was providing maybe 30% of his diet. And the formula - the eeeevil formula that makes for stupid babies with ear infections who go on to become serial killers because mommy never loved them enough - got him putting on weight, and thriving.

So tell me, all you lactivists out there, should I have kept up with the starving him? Maybe we should both have toughed it out, and when he died of dehydration and malnutrition, we could have been secure in the knowledge that at least I was a well-educated modern woman who knew that breast milk is infinitely superior to formula. So when people make comments like

babies are not well-served by the notion that breastfeeding and bottlefeeding are equally good choices. Of course it's a modern technical marvel that children do thrive on artificial baby milks. But cow/soya milk fed babies do less well than breastfed, on average, across a whole range of indicators and well into their later life. And the idea that the artificial milks are 'good enough' or 'almost as good' discourages women from trying breastfeeding, and discourages healthcare providers from providing adequate breastfeeding support to new mothers.

I have and would never bug an individual woman about her choice, because of the point you make about there being enough pressure already. But sometimes I have had to bite my tongue to be that nice, because formula is not just as good.

I am an MD, and a strong believer in the value of breastfeeding and a strong supporter of breastfeeding in general. I nursed all three of my kids (two were twins) until they were well over a year old, and never had to flash in public. I learned to use a blanket at home, and nursed my kids everywhere, in church, in the mall, everywhere, without flashing a boob. It's not that hard.

...I could hold my head high and say "Oh yes, I sacrificed my son for that very ideal."

My bad. I thought a living, breathing thriving baby was the better choice.


Quotes are blatantly stolen from the Making Light thread. Note that these attitudes are not the sole province of Making Light commenters; even my bottles have happy anti-formula messages on the sides. If you come across this post and feel the need to respond to the quotes, please don't go trolling in Teresa's sandbox; that was never my intention.