I didn't think this piece was hostile to breastfeeding in fact.  This story
has been covered in all the newspapers, on TV, and on radio as "mom bf/s baby
to death," but salon's approach was to interview Ruth Lawrence!  Here's the
end of the piece:

"Do you think cases like this will change the way breast-feeding is looked at?

Lawrence: I hope not. What we need to change is follow-up after babies leave
the hospital. We need to make sure that newborns are being seen. Breast-
feeding has tremendous benefits: It decreases infection and the likelihood of
illness in general; it decreases the cost of medical care and food in the
first year of life; and in the long term, it decreases allergies and increases
intelligence. You want to sweep all those benefits out the door because of one
case where a baby dies who happened to be breast-fed? I hope not. "

So that seems to me to be a pretty strong counter to the anti-bf thread in the
news media generally.

In fact I think that salon, by featuring its "Mothers Who Think" web site,
does a lot to normalize women's physical mothering lives, including bf.  The
"Table Talk" about this piece includes a number of posts from women who have
bf their preemies and one sad one from a mom who tried unsuccessfully -- very
supportive and serious and communal about the bf life of American moms.

Salon does also publish humor about bf sometimes in that column; and some of
us who know how important bf is are very sensitive to jokes about it, fearing
that any joke will be at bf's expense.  But I think that nothing is normalized
in society until the people who do it every day can joke about it, and that's
who's writing those pieces at salon --  mothers who bf every day.

For example there's a piece there joking about the similarity to pumping and
being a cow.  Now this is a hot button for a lot of us.  But the writer is A
MOTHER WHO HAS PUMPED A YEAR FOR EACH OF HER CHILDREN and says so -- her point
is that society makes it embarrassing to pump, that most American women can
only associate milk production with cows!  And this is true, and it's a big
problem, and it is never going to change until a lot of mothers feel they can
OWN it, JOKE about it, WRITE about it in public.

As far as I am concerned, anything that brings bf into the public eye and
says, ordinary smart women -- writers and all -- bf their babies and pump and
its part of life in the real world -- anything that does this is good for
mothers and good for bf.

Elisheva
(who is embarrassed to have found herself ranting a bit -- I guess overlaps
between bf and the literary world where I spend my non-bf life are *my* hot
buttons!)

Elisheva S. Urbas
book editor & bf lay counselor, NYC
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