Dear all:

My dear colleague, who salvaged the childbirth education component of Elizabeth Seton 
Childbearing Center, did a Diane Weisseninger on me regarding the terms "normal" and 
"natural".  She has made it her mission to stamp out the word "natural".  This implies 
that somehow we should just do it with no learning process and if we don't we are 
somehow failures.  

Nature actually can be quite cruel.  In nature, mammals eat their young if they are overly 
stressed, or there are deformities in their young.  In nature, some mammals eat other 
mammals.  In nature, you can make some slight error and that's the end of you.  I took 
some English class back in high school in the days when my instructors thought that 
"stream of consciousness writing" was the be all end all.  The class was called "Man and 
Nature" (and now would probably be called "Human and Nature").  So, I had many a 
story of the beauty and random cruelty of nature.  

Just to give you an extreme of human behavior, I met some anthropologists who were 
working in Puno, Peru near Lake Titicaca.  They explained to me the "natural" practices 
there that were to leave the baby in a corner of the room for 3 days and if the baby 
survived, they would then take care of it.  I have not verified their claims by checking out 
the published literature.  While this seems like a cruel practice, one can, with a little 
imagination, start to reason why this practice may have evolved as a strategy to put your 
efforts into the most likely to survive infants in an extremely harsh environment.

Instead of "natural" she uses the term "normal" because this implies something that 
should be a part of our life and you can "learn" how to do things in the "normal" manner 
even if you are living in a "high tech" society.  It also puts the alternative feeding 
methods into the "abnormal" territory.

As far as I'm concerned, "normal" infant feeding has been highly disrupted for 
generations and we have lost the learned part of "normal" infant feeding on so many 
levels any way you look at it. 

Best, Susan

             ***********************************************

Archives: http://community.lsoft.com/archives/LACTNET.html
Mail all commands to [log in to unmask]
To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail
To start it again: set lactnet mail (or [log in to unmask])
To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet or ([log in to unmask])
To reach list owners: [log in to unmask]