Hospitals pressured to end free baby formula

[Yo_Mama]

50. I just don't agree with that

First of all, if a woman "throws in the towel" then she's having problems, isn't she? But in my experience, most women who don't breastfeed or do it only for a few days do it because they are going back to work quickly, or just don't want to breastfeed. If a woman doesn't want to breastfeed, I don't think she should be guilted about it.

Breastfeeding when sick can be okay or not - it depends on what the mother is sick with and if she has to take medication that would get to the baby that she's breastfeeding. If you just have a little virus, it's better to breastfeed because the baby gets the immunity directly from you. But if you have whooping fever or a bacterial infection, no.

The companies do it because they want the mother to buy their formula if she's not breastfeeding, not because they are dumb enough to think that a woman who wants to breastfeed and can will change her mind because she's got a few free days of formula.

I have known more women who tried to breastfeed and failed to have enough milk than women who tried to breastfeed and dumped it because they didn't have enough milk.

I think drive-through deliveries cause a problem for some women who had intended to breastfeed, especially on the first birth, which tends to be harder. When women are ejected from the hospital in a state of staggering exhaustion, their milk tends to fail. Also you have a lot of older women giving birth for the first time, which doesn't help.

I'm going to reiterate what I wrote before. The idea that most women are so easily influenced that a few days of free formula will cause them not to breastfeed is totally insulting to women, and also just not true in my experience. Our society is completely unrealistic about what it expects from women, and then it covers up the inevitable results by further insulting them.

If you don't have enough milk for the baby, giving it the "old college try" is not the solution. And anyone who's ever seen a baby screaming and wailing at the breast because the baby is hungry knows that. The calvinistic purity approach to breastfeeding doesn't work, because if a woman is trying and isn't producing enough milk at the third and fourth day, the baby will get agitated and be screaming to be fed all the time. So then the mother gets really tired and frantic, and the whole situation goes downhill very rapidly.

What does work for a lot of women who want to breastfeed is to supplement with a bottle, and get a little more rest. My sister-in-law was able to breastfeed for 11 months, but only because of that approach. And once a woman has failed with the calvinistic purity approach, she's going to feel like an abject failure and have an aversion to trying again.

Oddly enough, women who never had problems breastfeeding seem to be the worst offenders here - they don't understand what other women may encounter.