I work in a hospital that passed the certification process to be called
Baby-Friendly about 3 years ago.  Even after that process, staff are not up
to the task of showing mothers that babies can be satiated at the breast
before lactogenesis II. Especially if the baby wants to feed all the time,
the staff are quick to agree with mothers that they just don't have 'enough'
milk yet, because the baby wants to feed again before three hours have passed.
Ironically, babies who don't want to feed exactly every three hours are
thought to be ill, as evidenced by their failure to feed often enough.
If the mother is Asian or African, the staff shrug and say 'none of *them*
think they have milk until they are painfully engorged, and we can't
convince them otherwise, so we might as well just give them formula when
they ask for it because we'll have no peace until we do'.  If the mother
asking for formula due to 'no milk yet' is Norwegian, they also give the
formula but when pressed by me as to why, they have no explanation and they
start looking sheepish.
Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that the culture which views
breastfeeding as inadequate as the sole nutrition for a newborn, is hospital
culture, rather than being a feature of a particular national background.  

I heard a Latina mother once tell me she decided to wean to formula because
she believed that her milk conveyed her emotional state to the baby in
liquid form and she was very sad.  She felt she was feeding her baby tears
rather than milk and she could not bear the thought of the baby becoming as
sad as she felt.  I don't work with many Latina women so I don't know if
this was ethnic or simply her own personal logic.  She felt sad about not
breastfeeding too, but she was comforted by knowing that at least she wasn't
communicating that sadness to the baby.  I thought the whole case was
terribly sad.

And an obstetrician in Beijing told me in 1991, as if it were a
well-documented fact, that Chinese women were so far evolved that they
didn't make milk any more.  She and apparently her colleagues, too, believed
that African women were closer to 'animals' and therefore always had copious
milk supplies, while European women were right in the middle between Chinese
and African, so some European women produced enough milk and some not. 
Shockingly racist view, and one which showed me that the speaker had no clue
whatsoever about how lactation works.  The hospital was where all the
foreign diplomats had babies, and they were brought from the nursery to the
mothers six times in twenty four hours, for feeding.  I didn't understand
how anyone could get a massive milk supply in that hospital at all.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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