When you tell someone else they should feel guilty, you are no longer dealing with guilt. You are dealing with shame. I believe that shaming people is wrong. Do I feel that every infant deserves a full-term breastfeeding experience because that is what is best for children? Yes. But I also feel that nursing is a dyad relationship. If the mother feels that her ability to adequately parent her child will be compromised because she will feel ill will, pain, hostility, resentment, etc towards her child then I am not sure it is actually in the best interests of the dyad to nurse. I feel it is sad when mothers don’t want to nurse, when they don’t even try. But a lot of why I feel that way is because I had a very easy experience breastfeeding.
I 100% believe that women should be encouraged with great vigor to give it a shot because even a couple of days of colustrum is better than nothing at all. But if a woman decides not to nurse… you know, I can’t see how me climbing on a bully pulpit and telling her that she sucks is helping anyone or anything.
People make me sad. Today, lactivists are at the top of the list of reasons I’m sad. Stop being such sanctimonious assholes.
I see a difference between people trying to educate that breast feeding is ‘better’ than formula and people ragging on formula people for not breast feeding. For years we taught people that formula is better than breast milk. ‘I do what my parents did’ is very hard to change.
I wrote this because someone put a quote on facebook this morning:
“Women should not feel guilty if they are unable to nurse their baby, but they should feel guilty if they are unwilling to do so, and they should be intellectually honest enough to know the difference.” ~ Elizabeth Gene
I’ve got little patience for lactavism. I starved for the first five weeks of my life because my mother’s body simply didn’t produce enough milk to feed me. Taking me off of breast milk and putting me on formula fixed that. Perhaps if there was less lactavist shaming going on, Mom wouldn’t have felt the need to stick it out for five weeks and I could have started being fed a little earlier.
Hooray for formula.
My mom made it 6 weeks with my brother and it hurt so much she just couldn’t do it anymore…
It’s funny…. In Africa (where I study) people were told that breast milk was better so they breast fed the boys and gave formula to the girls…. except the mothers were all malnourished so that breast milk wasn’t best…
I have this image of an asshole (literally) standing up at a pulpit preaching….thanks 🙂