I was infuriated by this article that I read this morning.....I am a Brit living in the USA...how is this for formula propaganda?  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=454403&in_page_id=1879&ito=1595
  My beautiful baby was starving to death, until I defied the 'breast is best' bulliesby SARAH OLIVER - More by this author » Last updated at 21:44pm on 12th May 2007    Comments (25) 
The nurse slumped against the door of my ward and clasped her hands to her mouth.     "I thought," she whispered as I bent over my newborn son, "that was blood."   She had caught sight of the crimson stars on the fabric swaddling Rufus as he lay awaiting his feed.   She had believed for an instant that I was so traumatised I had stabbed him. I looked at her uncomprehendingly. He was my adored son - how could she think I would hurt him?   Scroll down for more... 
     'It is this shameless anti-formula milk proselytising which bludgeons first-time mothers into thinking they must successfully breast-feed,' says Sarah Oliver (above)

  But of course, I already had. I was starving him towards jaundice, kidney failure and potentially even brain damage. Which is why, five days after a joyous return home from hospital with a chubby 8lb 2oz boy, he and I had been readmitted. He was down to a skinny 6lb 4oz, so exhausted he could not be roused by a bath and a hair wash.   Like 76 per cent of mothers in the UK, I had chosen to breast-feed. It's almost impossible not to, thanks to the relentless Breast is Best campaign run by the Department of Health, in tandem with powerful supporters such as Unicef, The National Childbirth Trust and the La Leche League.   Driven by predictably stern targets, the civil servants have already achieved a rise in the number of women breast-feeding from 69 per cent in 2000 to 76 per cent in 2005.   Today sees the start of the department's annual Breast-feeding Awareness Week, seven days of propaganda telling women to breast-feed exclusively in the first six months of life, and to
 continue until their children are weaned on to solids.   But campaigns such as these put health professionals under such pressure that, even when breast-feeding is failing, as with my son who lost 23 per cent of his body weight in a week, they are unwilling or unable to help a mother switch to a bottle.   Independent baby experts fighting this militancy in the breast-feeding movement believe that across the UK up to 1,000 mothers and their newborns could be hospitalised each week as a result of NHS Local Delivery Plans.   These demand a year-on-year increase of two per cent in breast-feeding rates, with statistics for birth rates, breast-feeding mothers and refuseniks despatched to Whitehall every quarter.   My own introduction to the world of Breast is Best came when I signed up for the National Childbirth Trust's ante-natal classes and the corresponding Breast-Feeding Workshop. Held in the heart of West London's yummy-mummy territory, Holland Park, it was a politically
 correct comedy.   Sitting in a circle, parents-to-be were asked if they had been breast or bottle-fed. Everyone replied breast, until one woman said she'd been bottle-fed.   The tutor seized on her. "And do you have issues with that? Do you resent your mother?" she asked, to which her victim replied with an embarrassed "No".   Later the tutor launched into a lengthy attack on the health implications of giving a baby formula milk.   She even suggested that the first formula powders had been produced in peanut factories, hinting that the explosion in nut allergies among today's children stems from a long hushed-up conspiracy.   It is this shameless anti-formula milk proselytising which bludgeons first-time mothers into thinking they must successfully breast-feed.   I knew while I was in the West Suffolk Hospital, Bury St Edmunds - which earned a Unicef Baby Friendly certificate the month before I had my son there - that I was not doing so.   Discharged two days after an
 emergency caesarean, I was visited daily at home by midwives who told me that perseverance was the key, adding that interchanging with a bottle would jeopardise any chance of success.   What was not made clear was the danger in which I was placing Rufus. As a first-time mother recovering from serious abdominal surgery, I was too exhausted and too uncertain to recognise it for myself.   My attempts at feeding would last one-and-a-half to two hours, and I'd try every three or four hours. I barely slept and felt alienated from my son and my husband, who was desperately worried about us both.   Five days after we had come home, a midwife hung my son on her fish-sling scales and calculated his weight loss on her mobile phone. She estimated he'd lost more than ten per cent of his body weight, the acceptable limit being five to ten per cent.   Mentally, I calculated he'd lost around 20 per cent.   Another midwife visited the following day with digital scales and we were
 immediately readmitted to hospital and put in the care of a paediatrician.   Rufus was instantly formula-fed, and given a bottle every three hours thereafter. Within 24 hours he was a different child - alert and noisy.   It was the nurse who thought I'd stabbed Rufus who helped me out of the labyrinth in which I was emotionally and physically lost, telling me that the mantra that all women are capable of breast-feeding (unless they have a medical condition or botched breast surgery) was a myth.   "Some women just don't get away with it. You're one, so put him on a bottle, take him home and feed him with love," she said.   After four days in hospital, twice the time I spent there for the birth, we left again, with Rufus enthusiastically established on a bottle. Britain's best known breast-feeding expert, Clare Byam-Cook, is in no doubt that the Government-sponsored obsession with the breast is hurting other children, too.   "It's madness," she told me, when I explained what
 I had been through.   "It's all about NHS targets and the idealism of the breast-feeding movement, which frankly cleaves to an ideal with a warped way of achieving it.   "They claim all mothers can breast-feed and make those who can't feel as if they've failed their child, doing a huge amount of emotional damage.   "They hark back to the old days before formula milk, conveniently ignoring the fact that there were wet nurses and a higher infant mortality rate due to malnutrition."   She says that many midwives are now so over-stretched they have no time or training to help struggling mothers - thanks partly to the box-ticking mentality that dominates the health service.   Some, meanwhile, are positively deluded.   "I once encountered a midwife who said she'd rather see every baby readmitted to hospital than given a drop of formula milk," says Clare.   "That's how dangerously narrow-minded some have become."   Not that she is an advocate for formula milk. On the contrary.  
 The author of What To Expect When You're Breast-feeding...And What If You Can't? and adviser to celebrity mothers such as Kate Winslet, Kate Beckinsale, Helena Bonham Carter, Gabby Logan, Lucy Rusedski and Emma Freud, is a passionate supporter of breast-feeding.   But she is critical of NHS targets and UK hospitals' pursuit of Unicef's Baby Friendly status.   "It has a lot to answer for," she said.   "It's aimed at the Third World, where mothers don't have access to sterilising equipment and clean water. It's considered a badge of honour - but it's all part of this ridiculous breast-feeding bandwagon."   I would never deny that breast-feeding forms a potent bond between mother and child and has well-established health benefits long into life. It is also free and portable.   But, while it is natural, it is not easy - 89 per cent of new mothers report difficulties - and success demands the knowledge and support of a gifted midwife.   Even Sue Ashmore, director of Unicef's
 Baby Friendly Initiative in the UK, concedes this point. She says that it was not intended to bully mothers who did not wish to breast-feed, but to ensure a minimum standard of care for those who did.   "Babies are put at risk when you don't have good breast-feeding policies or training, where hospitals are just paying lip-service to it," she said.   "Ninety-eight per cent of women are physiologically capable of feeding their child and have enough milk to do so. So many fail simply because they are not doing it properly.   "No baby should be readmitted to hospital because of a failure to thrive - that is an indictment of the health service.   "But where it does happen it is not because of rabid breast-feeding promotion, but rather a lack of proper policy. Mothers can fall through great big gaps because they have not had a decent package of care, It's a systemic failure."   Although the Department of Health accepts "all infants should be managed individually", in practice
 there is a one-size-fits-all policy dictated from on high, and anyone who deviates is made to feel like a criminal.   I'm by no means alone.   Another mother whose baby lost a dangerous amount of weight is Georgina Bassett, a 40-year-old former financial controller and mother of two daughters from Fulham, West London.   Her eldest child Charlotte, now six, lost more than 20 per cent of her 8lb 3oz birth weight and was so badly dehydrated by her third day of life that doctors considered putting her on a drip.   Georgina said: "In hospital I was eventually given an expressing machine, but only very grudgingly. It was such a battle to get support for bottle-feeding."   When her second daughter, Alexandra, was born three months ago, she bottle-fed with expressed milk until her baby could hold her head up and breast-feed comfortably.   "My midwife was incredibly dismissive and said that since she'd had a bottle, Alex would never go back on my breast," she said.   "At six weeks
 I restarted breast-feeding and we were successful. But in both cases I was met with pure militancy instead of understanding."   My own recovery was slower. The breast-feeding debacle had damaged my confidence and my ability to mother Rufus. But at eight weeks I was signed off by my health visitor.   "It's lovely to see you doing so well after your dreadful start," she said.   "Oh, it's fine, we've put it behind us," I said, and gave her the speech I had prepared about not being angry or bitter because I could only hold myself responsible for trying and failing to breast-feed my son and putting him in hospital.   "No," she said with firmness. "It should never have happened."   And you know what? She is right. 
   
  Julie Taylor  RN IBCLC
   
   

       
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