This focus on "positive" and showing the benefits of breastfeeding, not
the risk is nothing more than a big fat red herring! The term "scare
tactics" is used selectively by people who do not like the message. It
is absolutely meaningless, as the Prevention article using the word
"deadly" in conjunction with bed sharing shows. This kind of
sensationalism without merit (meant to keep us in a narrow culturally /
corporate prescribed line, NOT an evidence based one) is absolutely
typical of most advertisements in the U.S. PSA's use risk based
messaging because we are used to it, and it works.

There has been no public health campaign in my lifetime that used the
"benefits" of not engaging in a dangerous behavior. This is absolutely
absurd to an extreme and for one good reason: you can not sell
normalcy. Breastfeeding, not smoking, not sniffing glue, not drinking
and driving are all NORMAL default positions and have no benefits.
Jarring people with previously unknown information about what can
happen to real people is the only thing that will "sell" a healthy
behavior. We need to be shown. In American society where prime time
shows depict volunteers drinking crushed worms for money and munching
cockroaches need to have a strong message to perk up their ears. they
don't care about "benefits". there are benefits to a lot of things,
like an Ivy League education, that people can acknowledge are good but
not "the norm". People think that nothing can happen to *them*; but
seeing the mangled car, the vegetative state of the teen who sniffed
too much glue, the woman with a trach and a voice box after a life of
smoking, the child sized crash dummy flying through the windshield (all
PSAs I have seen in my lifetime) are often the first time people (who
are very visual) really understand that there is a real risk involved
in what they do. You can not sell not-smoking by showing 2 non-smoking
people enjoying a meal together. it is meaningless. It is absurd to try
and sell normal.

Using the term "scare tactics" is just another way to mar a message the
detractors don't like. It is also hypocritical. We all know that the
health care field is pretty much comprised of scare tactics! I remember
being told, and believing, that my daughter would be "profoundly
disabled" if I did not consent to a csection. I was told my baby would
"die" if I went over 41 weeks (I went 44 weeks, my daughter is neither
disabled nor dead). I was treated to the pediatric resident's lovely
reminiscences of deathly ill babies who didn't get to antibiotics in
time when I tried to refuse IV abx for my healthy, infection free baby.
I think introducing the American public to the idea that bottle-feeding
is bad for humans is a perfectly reasonable, even humble first step.
That some members of the AAP are against this idea, and have their
fingers in the ABM pie, smacks of outright corruption and should be
called out.

I just needed to vent that somewhere; thank for reading :^)

Michelle DePesa

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