Bloomberg's Formula
I wrote this post a few days ago and let it sit, hesitating to actually POST it. Chris loved the piece, bless his heart, and kept nagging me to post. Why the delay? I couldn’t really say for sure. Part of my procrastination was that fact that it’s a tad political, which I’d rather not do right on the heels of my more-political-than-usual Chick-fil-A post, and part of my dilly-dallying was that this post is about breastfeeding, which is naturally kind of a private thing, emotionally and socially loaded as it may be.
But.
In the end, I couldn’t stay quiet. Shocking, I know. Here’s the post, y’all:
I am livid. L-I-V-I-D.
I suppose we all have our super sensitive spot that spurs us to political despair, and I think mine just got slammed, because no public policy initiative or move has ever ticked me off to the degree this one has.
Mayor Bloomberg—the same NYC mayor who banned soda in certain sizes to attempt to get a handle on obesity—has launched an initiative, again aimed at obesity prevention, for 27 local hospitals TO LITERALLY LOCK UP BABY FORMULA and dole it out exactly like medication in order to PRESSURE WOMEN TO BREASTFEED.
On Monday morning, my jaw hit the ground, along with Chris’s, as we watched Becky Quick, a news anchor on CNBC’s Squawk Box, describe the new initiative and then blast it (GOOD FOR HER!). As the mum of a young child under a year old (whom she breastfed, just for the record), she described the signs in the hospital declaring ONLY BREASTMILK FOR THE FIRST 6 MONTHS!, the physical trauma of giving birth followed by the immediate physical demands, pain, and problems of breastfeeding—especially for new moms who had no clue what they’re in for, nursing staff that shames you into it, pediatricians pushing breastfeeding, and on and on. “New moms feel enough guilt as it is,” she argued.
Yes, Becky. Yes, yes, yes!
Her co-host tried to agree, saying, “When we were breastfeeding our twins—”
“YOU did not breastfeed anybody,” Becky interrupted. “Your wife did.”
That’s just the thing. Only moms can breastfeed. As Becky, damn near boiling with rage (along with the rest of us in the Hofmann household) said, “No MAN can make a decision like this.”
I was so dismayed, but life goes on. We got ready for the rest of the morning and began the drive into work and school, my partially breastfed now-toddler singing to herself in the backseat.
“He can’t actually do this, right?” I asked Chris in a too-small voice. “Bloomberg won’t get away with it. He can’t, can he?”
Chris shook his head somewhat despairingly. “That’s what they said about the soda, and he won. He could get away with it.”
The fact that the World Health Organization is backing his plan does not help, but the World Health Organization is not an American entity and should have no say in our policy. The arrogance that a politician such as Bloomberg has to treat his constituents like children, restricting their liberties “for their own good” terrifies me. Having the government encroach on private life—especially for something as personal as breastfeeding—is such an invasion, such an overstepping of political power, such a show of cocky control.
Some breastfeeding groups and gurus are praising Bloomberg’s plan, which is doubly dismaying. Breastfeeding groups should focus on supporting moms who want to breastfeed do so in a healthy way; they should not meddle in policy deliberately designed to manipulate and push mothers into it.
In short, this initiative can NOT be allowed to succeed. It just can’t. As my ever-cynical Chris pointed out, “New Yorkers let him take their sodas. Did they think he’d stop there? Now he’s going under women’s shirts.” Pretty much. It’s like he’s trying to get to second base with every woman who gives birth at 27 different hospitals. It would be creepy if it weren’t so enraging.
I’ve written about breastfeeding a little bit on this blog, so many of my dear readers know I think it is WAY overvalued. Breastfeeding propaganda is out of control and, in my view, reflects a disturbing trend to limit mothers, trapping them in and reducing them to their bodies.
Here’s my saga, so y’all can see where I’m coming from. It’s graphic, but I’m sorry. People like Bloomberg need to grasp the private and (literally) bloody mess that breastfeeding is.
Charlotte was born, nice and healthy. I held her for about 12 seconds when the nurse said, “Okay, let’s try breastfeeding. You’re going to breastfeed, right?”
“Um, yeah,” I said. I was still in Labor & Delivery and had put my legs down for the first time in hours less than a minute prior. I wasn’t terribly with it. So, we tried, but Charlotte was disinterested.
I was transferred to the mother–baby recovery room and immediately pushed to breastfeed again by this next nurse. This time, Charlotte did better. The next 24 hours involved a lot of trial and error, but she was sort of kind of getting fed.
The next day, the latest nurse instructed me to attend the breastfeeding class at the hospital. I went. There, I learned I’d need to feed Charlotte every 45 minutes that night. I panicked. I hadn’t slept the past two nights (night one was spent birthing my child, night two was spent attempting to feed her), and I already felt like I was about to die of exhaustion, every part of my body hurt, and because Charlotte was born early, my mom hadn’t yet gotten to the East Coast. Chris was like a walking zombie, also sleep deprived. I felt alone and totally overwhelmed.
Next, the nursing staff weighed Charlotte and, as we later learned, made some sort of error, but at the time it was appearing that Charlotte was losing weight at a way-too-fast pace. I had given her everything I had, every ounce of energy and every drop of pain I could endure, and it wasn’t doing squat. The nursing staff ramped up their breastfeeding pressure, pushing me to feed even MORE often, and the curse word “formula” was now getting thrown around, which I had been taught by the super stupid parenting books to Absolutely Not Allow.
Meanwhile, the pain while feeding had become excruciating. Finally, I had an absolute meltdown—I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t endure another feeding. My child would starve. My first task as a mom, and I was utterly failing.
It was at this point the lactation consultant walked into my room.
Now, lactation consultants get a bad reputation as “Breastfeeding Nazis” from people who (like me) are so sick of the breastfeeding pressure, so it is important to realize they are not all like that. Carol was not like that.
“What’s going on?” she asked, perfectly calm.
I sob-talked, explaining my failure, the pain, the exhaustion. Chris was there too. “Well, let’s take a look,” she said, oozing capability and calm. “Oh my,” she said, when she had gotten a good look at me. “On a scale of one to ten, I’d say—well, let’s just say that this is some of the worst I’ve seen, especially this soon after birth.”
Great.
Carol made Chris look. “You need to see what your wife is dealing with,” she told him. He complied and probably decided to skip lunch. God bless Carol. She was SO on the mommy’s side, the American Academy of Pediatrics and La Leche League be damned.
Carol said she needed to check out Charlotte to try to determine what was causing the, um, trauma. She stuck a gloved finger in her Charlotte’s mouth, which Charlotte immediately began sucking. Hard. “Wow,” Carol said. “I mean . . . wow. Your baby has an extremely strong suck.”
In short, our problem wasn’t that Charlotte was sucking WRONG, it was that she was sucking too STRONGLY. But really, I barely heard Carol. All I wanted was a bottle of formula and some peace and quiet to sleep.
Again, Carol forced Chris to get involved. She made him wash his hands then put his finger in Charlotte’s mouth. “You feel that?” she asked him, as his eyes widened at Charlotte’s suck. “That’s what’s happening to your wife.”
Chris looked at me, his finger still in Charlotte’s mouth, and he said with great sincerity, “I’m sorry, sweetie.”
So, now that Carol had sized up the situation, we had to figure out what to do. We had a bit of a dilemma. Imagine a really gross leg wound and try to figure out how to get it to heal if you keep rubbing sandpaper on it for a half hour every 45 minutes. A bit tricky, right?
I was in tears (again), feeling absolutely trapped and overwhelmed, and Carol finally asked me, “Honey, why are you doing this to yourself? Why do you want to breastfeed so badly?”
“Because [sob] I [sob] HAVE [sob] to. I [sob] don’t [sob] want [sob] to [sob] FAIL!”
Bless Carol’s heart, she got me set up with a pump, which isn’t exactly quick or friction-free, but at least it wasn’t Charlotte’s mouth, and we were able to pull all the precious colostrum and some milk with that. The trouble is, pumping takes longer than nursing and I couldn’t keep up. But realization of that problem came later.
Carol also made sure I was fully stocked with formula, right there in the room (that is, NOTHING WAS LOCKED AWAY). “You don’t have to use it,” she said, “but it’s there, okay? It’s completely your choice.”
That third night, I made the enormously wrong decision to send Chris home. He was exhausted and I figured that one of us should sleep, so he could be of actual use the next day. I couldn’t be the one to sleep, thanks to the hell of breastfeeding, so he was the lucky duck.
And so began another long, sleepless night, and this time I was by myself. I was out of pumped milk, and breastfeeding Charlotte was going terribly. Due to recently giving birth, I still had A LOT of trouble hauling myself in and out of bed, especially while holding an infant, and things were getting increasingly worse. Around midnight, I paced around my hospital room, ineptly attempting to soothe Charlotte while she cried.
A new nurse came in. “Have you tried feeding her?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It didn’t work.”
The nurse looked at me. “When did you last sleep?”
“I don’t remember. Three nights ago? Maybe?”
The nurse took Charlotte from me and put her in the bassinet. “Listen,” she said. “I have to take your baby to get her weighed. Why don’t you let us give her a bottle of formula and we’ll keep her in the nursery until it’s time for her to eat again. That should give you 3 or 4 hours of sleep.”
Note that this is precisely the evil scenario that breastfeeding propaganda, parenting books, La Leche League, the AAP, and Mayor Bloomberg warn about: EVIL NURSES TRYING TO HELP BRAND-NEW, EXHAUSTED MOTHERS.
Evil nurse? Um, no. That woman was a gift from God. I okayed it, feeling incredibly guilty as she wheeled Charlotte out of the room, and I climbed into bed feeling like the worst mom in the world. But I slept for 3 hours, and it was glorious.
With the exception of that illicit late-night bottle, Charlotte was exclusively breastfed for 3 more weeks. Things were going pretty much terribly, I was a wreck, and Charlotte was, essentially, hungry all the time. I just couldn’t produce enough to keep her satisfied, and boy, she let me know it.
Finally, the drama climaxed. After hours and hours and hours of crying and failed attempts to breastfeed (I suspected and later confirmed that I was just plain EMPTY), I called the pediatrician, convinced Charlotte was really sick. Why else wouldn’t she stop crying? He said to give her formula. “Are you sure?” I asked. “It’s so bad for her!”
“It’s fine,” the doctor said. “Really.”
I cried as I mixed that first bottle of formula, feeling absolutely failure-like. Again. I gave Charlotte bottle after bottle after bottle. I don’t remember how much she ate, but it was an obscene amount. Eventually, finally satisfied, the child drifted to sleep and slept for 5 hours straight—until that point, her longest stretch of sleep ever.
By the time she woke up, my supply had improved, so I was able to feed her in the AAP-sanctioned way. Chris, thank goodness, backed the formula supplementing 100%, even though it meant he now had the joy of handling some of the late-night feedings (another HUGE plus of formula feeding). We used formula to fill in gaps from then on, especially so Chris could handle a late-night feeding (she’d wake up about 4 times per night to eat). In retrospect, my only regrets are being so hard on myself, waiting so long, and letting the pastel-pink AAP breastfeeding book—which portrays breastfeeding as this serene, organic, naturally beautiful act—gauge the quality of my mothering.
New mothers are a little sensitive, Mayor Bloomberg. Fyi.
When I returned to work, Charlotte was on more of a schedule. She nursed in the morning, had a bottle of formula at school, a bottle of breast milk (which I had generated the day before in my office, praying nobody ignored the note on my door and barged in), another bottle of formula, and then I nursed her at night again before putting her down for the evening. (She slept through the night at this point, thank goodness.) As rice cereal and solids entered the picture, I eventually stopped that midday bottle of breast milk.
For me, breastfeeding didn’t stop being incredibly painful until about 5 months. FIVE. MONTHS.
I weaned Charlotte—well, she weaned herself, really—at 8 months.
Ironically, it was after I returned to work that I actually valued breastfeeding. (See? I’m NOT anti-breastfeeding!) I missed my girl during the day, and I loved that time with just her and me, rocking rocking rocking in her dimly lit nursery, still in my work clothes, winding down for the day. Those before-bed nursing sessions were just between her and me, intimate and sweet.
So. The benefits of breastfeeding so often touted are correlational and most likely exaggerated. Considering the risk of post-partum depression and the fact that difficulty breastfeeding is significantly correlated with PPD, restricting a mother’s escape hatch or guilting her to decide not to use it when it’s in the best interest of her mental health and, possibly, her baby’s physical health is so short-sighted. (And mean and controlling.)
And the thing is, that long-winded saga I just described? It’s not very unusual. Millions of women have similar circumstances. I was, really, my own worst enemy. It was the lactation consultant and midnight nurse who ultimately advocated for me and the evil, evil formula—I didn’t dare push for it myself. I have no idea how hospital regulations on formula would have affected me, but I can’t imagine that it would have been pretty.
And let’s say there are women who just don’t want to breastfeed. Period, for whatever reason. How DARE anybody question their right or choice to do so? As my (ironically, now public) story shows, breastfeeding is a private endeavor that requires more commitment, discomfort, sleep deprivation, inconvenience, and lifestyle adaptation than Mayor Bloomberg will EVER understand. As I told Chris, let’s see Bloomberg take a shower with his hands over HIS boobies for 6 months because little streams of water hitting them straight-on will elicit screaming. And forget about towel drying.
It’s not his right to meddle in mothers’ decisions on whether to breastfeed. It’s just not his right.
But.
In the end, I couldn’t stay quiet. Shocking, I know. Here’s the post, y’all:
I am livid. L-I-V-I-D.
I suppose we all have our super sensitive spot that spurs us to political despair, and I think mine just got slammed, because no public policy initiative or move has ever ticked me off to the degree this one has.
Mayor Bloomberg—the same NYC mayor who banned soda in certain sizes to attempt to get a handle on obesity—has launched an initiative, again aimed at obesity prevention, for 27 local hospitals TO LITERALLY LOCK UP BABY FORMULA and dole it out exactly like medication in order to PRESSURE WOMEN TO BREASTFEED.
On Monday morning, my jaw hit the ground, along with Chris’s, as we watched Becky Quick, a news anchor on CNBC’s Squawk Box, describe the new initiative and then blast it (GOOD FOR HER!). As the mum of a young child under a year old (whom she breastfed, just for the record), she described the signs in the hospital declaring ONLY BREASTMILK FOR THE FIRST 6 MONTHS!, the physical trauma of giving birth followed by the immediate physical demands, pain, and problems of breastfeeding—especially for new moms who had no clue what they’re in for, nursing staff that shames you into it, pediatricians pushing breastfeeding, and on and on. “New moms feel enough guilt as it is,” she argued.
Yes, Becky. Yes, yes, yes!
Her co-host tried to agree, saying, “When we were breastfeeding our twins—”
“YOU did not breastfeed anybody,” Becky interrupted. “Your wife did.”
That’s just the thing. Only moms can breastfeed. As Becky, damn near boiling with rage (along with the rest of us in the Hofmann household) said, “No MAN can make a decision like this.”
I was so dismayed, but life goes on. We got ready for the rest of the morning and began the drive into work and school, my partially breastfed now-toddler singing to herself in the backseat.
“He can’t actually do this, right?” I asked Chris in a too-small voice. “Bloomberg won’t get away with it. He can’t, can he?”
Chris shook his head somewhat despairingly. “That’s what they said about the soda, and he won. He could get away with it.”
The fact that the World Health Organization is backing his plan does not help, but the World Health Organization is not an American entity and should have no say in our policy. The arrogance that a politician such as Bloomberg has to treat his constituents like children, restricting their liberties “for their own good” terrifies me. Having the government encroach on private life—especially for something as personal as breastfeeding—is such an invasion, such an overstepping of political power, such a show of cocky control.
Some breastfeeding groups and gurus are praising Bloomberg’s plan, which is doubly dismaying. Breastfeeding groups should focus on supporting moms who want to breastfeed do so in a healthy way; they should not meddle in policy deliberately designed to manipulate and push mothers into it.
In short, this initiative can NOT be allowed to succeed. It just can’t. As my ever-cynical Chris pointed out, “New Yorkers let him take their sodas. Did they think he’d stop there? Now he’s going under women’s shirts.” Pretty much. It’s like he’s trying to get to second base with every woman who gives birth at 27 different hospitals. It would be creepy if it weren’t so enraging.
I’ve written about breastfeeding a little bit on this blog, so many of my dear readers know I think it is WAY overvalued. Breastfeeding propaganda is out of control and, in my view, reflects a disturbing trend to limit mothers, trapping them in and reducing them to their bodies.
Here’s my saga, so y’all can see where I’m coming from. It’s graphic, but I’m sorry. People like Bloomberg need to grasp the private and (literally) bloody mess that breastfeeding is.
Charlotte was born, nice and healthy. I held her for about 12 seconds when the nurse said, “Okay, let’s try breastfeeding. You’re going to breastfeed, right?”
“Um, yeah,” I said. I was still in Labor & Delivery and had put my legs down for the first time in hours less than a minute prior. I wasn’t terribly with it. So, we tried, but Charlotte was disinterested.
I was transferred to the mother–baby recovery room and immediately pushed to breastfeed again by this next nurse. This time, Charlotte did better. The next 24 hours involved a lot of trial and error, but she was sort of kind of getting fed.
The next day, the latest nurse instructed me to attend the breastfeeding class at the hospital. I went. There, I learned I’d need to feed Charlotte every 45 minutes that night. I panicked. I hadn’t slept the past two nights (night one was spent birthing my child, night two was spent attempting to feed her), and I already felt like I was about to die of exhaustion, every part of my body hurt, and because Charlotte was born early, my mom hadn’t yet gotten to the East Coast. Chris was like a walking zombie, also sleep deprived. I felt alone and totally overwhelmed.
Next, the nursing staff weighed Charlotte and, as we later learned, made some sort of error, but at the time it was appearing that Charlotte was losing weight at a way-too-fast pace. I had given her everything I had, every ounce of energy and every drop of pain I could endure, and it wasn’t doing squat. The nursing staff ramped up their breastfeeding pressure, pushing me to feed even MORE often, and the curse word “formula” was now getting thrown around, which I had been taught by the super stupid parenting books to Absolutely Not Allow.
Meanwhile, the pain while feeding had become excruciating. Finally, I had an absolute meltdown—I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t endure another feeding. My child would starve. My first task as a mom, and I was utterly failing.
It was at this point the lactation consultant walked into my room.
Now, lactation consultants get a bad reputation as “Breastfeeding Nazis” from people who (like me) are so sick of the breastfeeding pressure, so it is important to realize they are not all like that. Carol was not like that.
“What’s going on?” she asked, perfectly calm.
I sob-talked, explaining my failure, the pain, the exhaustion. Chris was there too. “Well, let’s take a look,” she said, oozing capability and calm. “Oh my,” she said, when she had gotten a good look at me. “On a scale of one to ten, I’d say—well, let’s just say that this is some of the worst I’ve seen, especially this soon after birth.”
Great.
Carol made Chris look. “You need to see what your wife is dealing with,” she told him. He complied and probably decided to skip lunch. God bless Carol. She was SO on the mommy’s side, the American Academy of Pediatrics and La Leche League be damned.
Carol said she needed to check out Charlotte to try to determine what was causing the, um, trauma. She stuck a gloved finger in her Charlotte’s mouth, which Charlotte immediately began sucking. Hard. “Wow,” Carol said. “I mean . . . wow. Your baby has an extremely strong suck.”
In short, our problem wasn’t that Charlotte was sucking WRONG, it was that she was sucking too STRONGLY. But really, I barely heard Carol. All I wanted was a bottle of formula and some peace and quiet to sleep.
Again, Carol forced Chris to get involved. She made him wash his hands then put his finger in Charlotte’s mouth. “You feel that?” she asked him, as his eyes widened at Charlotte’s suck. “That’s what’s happening to your wife.”
Chris looked at me, his finger still in Charlotte’s mouth, and he said with great sincerity, “I’m sorry, sweetie.”
So, now that Carol had sized up the situation, we had to figure out what to do. We had a bit of a dilemma. Imagine a really gross leg wound and try to figure out how to get it to heal if you keep rubbing sandpaper on it for a half hour every 45 minutes. A bit tricky, right?
I was in tears (again), feeling absolutely trapped and overwhelmed, and Carol finally asked me, “Honey, why are you doing this to yourself? Why do you want to breastfeed so badly?”
“Because [sob] I [sob] HAVE [sob] to. I [sob] don’t [sob] want [sob] to [sob] FAIL!”
Bless Carol’s heart, she got me set up with a pump, which isn’t exactly quick or friction-free, but at least it wasn’t Charlotte’s mouth, and we were able to pull all the precious colostrum and some milk with that. The trouble is, pumping takes longer than nursing and I couldn’t keep up. But realization of that problem came later.
Carol also made sure I was fully stocked with formula, right there in the room (that is, NOTHING WAS LOCKED AWAY). “You don’t have to use it,” she said, “but it’s there, okay? It’s completely your choice.”
That third night, I made the enormously wrong decision to send Chris home. He was exhausted and I figured that one of us should sleep, so he could be of actual use the next day. I couldn’t be the one to sleep, thanks to the hell of breastfeeding, so he was the lucky duck.
And so began another long, sleepless night, and this time I was by myself. I was out of pumped milk, and breastfeeding Charlotte was going terribly. Due to recently giving birth, I still had A LOT of trouble hauling myself in and out of bed, especially while holding an infant, and things were getting increasingly worse. Around midnight, I paced around my hospital room, ineptly attempting to soothe Charlotte while she cried.
A new nurse came in. “Have you tried feeding her?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It didn’t work.”
The nurse looked at me. “When did you last sleep?”
“I don’t remember. Three nights ago? Maybe?”
The nurse took Charlotte from me and put her in the bassinet. “Listen,” she said. “I have to take your baby to get her weighed. Why don’t you let us give her a bottle of formula and we’ll keep her in the nursery until it’s time for her to eat again. That should give you 3 or 4 hours of sleep.”
Note that this is precisely the evil scenario that breastfeeding propaganda, parenting books, La Leche League, the AAP, and Mayor Bloomberg warn about: EVIL NURSES TRYING TO HELP BRAND-NEW, EXHAUSTED MOTHERS.
Evil nurse? Um, no. That woman was a gift from God. I okayed it, feeling incredibly guilty as she wheeled Charlotte out of the room, and I climbed into bed feeling like the worst mom in the world. But I slept for 3 hours, and it was glorious.
With the exception of that illicit late-night bottle, Charlotte was exclusively breastfed for 3 more weeks. Things were going pretty much terribly, I was a wreck, and Charlotte was, essentially, hungry all the time. I just couldn’t produce enough to keep her satisfied, and boy, she let me know it.
Finally, the drama climaxed. After hours and hours and hours of crying and failed attempts to breastfeed (I suspected and later confirmed that I was just plain EMPTY), I called the pediatrician, convinced Charlotte was really sick. Why else wouldn’t she stop crying? He said to give her formula. “Are you sure?” I asked. “It’s so bad for her!”
“It’s fine,” the doctor said. “Really.”
I cried as I mixed that first bottle of formula, feeling absolutely failure-like. Again. I gave Charlotte bottle after bottle after bottle. I don’t remember how much she ate, but it was an obscene amount. Eventually, finally satisfied, the child drifted to sleep and slept for 5 hours straight—until that point, her longest stretch of sleep ever.
By the time she woke up, my supply had improved, so I was able to feed her in the AAP-sanctioned way. Chris, thank goodness, backed the formula supplementing 100%, even though it meant he now had the joy of handling some of the late-night feedings (another HUGE plus of formula feeding). We used formula to fill in gaps from then on, especially so Chris could handle a late-night feeding (she’d wake up about 4 times per night to eat). In retrospect, my only regrets are being so hard on myself, waiting so long, and letting the pastel-pink AAP breastfeeding book—which portrays breastfeeding as this serene, organic, naturally beautiful act—gauge the quality of my mothering.
New mothers are a little sensitive, Mayor Bloomberg. Fyi.
When I returned to work, Charlotte was on more of a schedule. She nursed in the morning, had a bottle of formula at school, a bottle of breast milk (which I had generated the day before in my office, praying nobody ignored the note on my door and barged in), another bottle of formula, and then I nursed her at night again before putting her down for the evening. (She slept through the night at this point, thank goodness.) As rice cereal and solids entered the picture, I eventually stopped that midday bottle of breast milk.
For me, breastfeeding didn’t stop being incredibly painful until about 5 months. FIVE. MONTHS.
I weaned Charlotte—well, she weaned herself, really—at 8 months.
Ironically, it was after I returned to work that I actually valued breastfeeding. (See? I’m NOT anti-breastfeeding!) I missed my girl during the day, and I loved that time with just her and me, rocking rocking rocking in her dimly lit nursery, still in my work clothes, winding down for the day. Those before-bed nursing sessions were just between her and me, intimate and sweet.
So. The benefits of breastfeeding so often touted are correlational and most likely exaggerated. Considering the risk of post-partum depression and the fact that difficulty breastfeeding is significantly correlated with PPD, restricting a mother’s escape hatch or guilting her to decide not to use it when it’s in the best interest of her mental health and, possibly, her baby’s physical health is so short-sighted. (And mean and controlling.)
And the thing is, that long-winded saga I just described? It’s not very unusual. Millions of women have similar circumstances. I was, really, my own worst enemy. It was the lactation consultant and midnight nurse who ultimately advocated for me and the evil, evil formula—I didn’t dare push for it myself. I have no idea how hospital regulations on formula would have affected me, but I can’t imagine that it would have been pretty.
And let’s say there are women who just don’t want to breastfeed. Period, for whatever reason. How DARE anybody question their right or choice to do so? As my (ironically, now public) story shows, breastfeeding is a private endeavor that requires more commitment, discomfort, sleep deprivation, inconvenience, and lifestyle adaptation than Mayor Bloomberg will EVER understand. As I told Chris, let’s see Bloomberg take a shower with his hands over HIS boobies for 6 months because little streams of water hitting them straight-on will elicit screaming. And forget about towel drying.
It’s not his right to meddle in mothers’ decisions on whether to breastfeed. It’s just not his right.
I have so much to say on this topic, but not really the time to say it, nor do I want to overtake your comments section. So I will just say this: While breastmilk may provide the best nutrition for a baby when the mother is able to produce enough milk, it is most definitely NOT always "best for mom and baby", as has often been touted. I'm appalled at Bloomberg's initiative and truly hope it does not pass.
ReplyDelete