dear everyone,

this is long, but i want to do justice to the discussion by including the
whole thing. i would like plenty of good reasons why this makes me so angry,
so that my refutation can be based on facts and not on . . . my perfect
intuition . . . shall we say.

a few months ago i had a lll call but referred by a direct entry midwife (the
same as lay or homebirth midwives). the caller was the adoptive mother of a
baby borne only a couple of weeks previously by a surrogate mother. she was
obviously very strange, and it took a long time to get her to cough up all
the relevant facts. she had various concerns, but was NOT concerned about the
lack of weight gain of this baby. turns out the birth mother had agreed to
pump a complete milk supply for several months but had decided to stop and
was reducing what she provided. (if it were me, i would have taken the baby
back as well.)  the adoptive mother was feeding the baby the breast milk and
. . . strained barley water. that's right, just the water strained from
cooked barley. seems she had been given a recipe for "formula" made from
goats milk and barley water, but somehow didn't believe the goat's milk part
was necessary.

this was the call during which i made an impassioned plea for using , yup,
you guessed it, the white stuff. of course after the call i burned up the
phone line calling the midwife, who reported that they were having a great
deal of trouble with the parents and were monitoring the weight very closely,
etc. it was obvious that they were uh odd, but they did eventually feed the
baby enough calories and i didn't have to deal with them after that.

so i inquired of my best friend, another lay midwife, about another formula
mentioned by the first midwife. oh! she said. i can get the recipe for you.
of course we would never recommend formula, its poisonous (well, true). so,
this woman in boulder has developed this recipe that's perfect. several
children have been raised on it and they are "okay." she further defended the
recipe by saying that the woman who developed it had "a master's degree in
chemistry" and had done a lot of research.

in defense of the midwives in general, at least the ones around here, they
require that their clients breastfeed, and many are requiring that their
clients go to la leche league before delivery (my suggestion). the number of
times that they might have to suggest that someone use the other stuff are so
rare that my friend, who has practiced for fifteen years, can recall only two
occasions. the more recent one was a case that i was involved with, and my
friend recommended the nice and stinky non-allergenic formula.

but she tells me that she would recommend this stuff before formula, because
it is "better." their professional organization has no formal policy about
this, which i think is a real problem, but since legalization is only three
years old here, it has not been important to them to deal with yet.

here it is, and i did not create it. i think the fact that there is no name
on this is a very negative factor right off the bat!

GOAT MILK FORMULA

This method requires some determination and diligence, although it's not a
lot more complicated then mixing powdered formulas. Most commercial formulas
cause gas and colic. Many of them are cow milk based. Cow milk contains seven
times as much casein (a protein) as human milk, as well as very large fat
globules, both of which can cause colic in a human infant who is considerably
smaller than a calf. There is also evidence that infants who consume cow milk
(even through breast milk) have higher rates of diabetes later in life. Soy
formulas can also cause colic and be allergenic in some infants. Goat milk
has the same amount of casein as human milk, and very small fat globules.
It's really the closest thing to human milk, but does require a couple of
extra ingredients.

INGREDIENTS:
1) pasteurized goat milk

2) bifido bacteria or children's acidophilus - this is sold at health food
stores in the refrigerator section. Begin by making your stock solution with
100 grams of bifido per quart of milk. Adjust the amount of bifido bacteria
in the total quantity of formula relative ot the consistency of the baby's
stool. Too much will make the stool too runny, too little will cause
constipation.

3) liquid pediatric vitamin containing a daily dose of
   b) 5-10 milligrams of iron
   a) 60 micrograms Folic Acid

The best way to begin is by making a quart of "stock" solution, mixed with
the bifido bacteria and liquid vitamin. You can simply add the bifido and
liquid vitamins to the quart of milk and shake. Using bottles that hold eight
ounces, you can add four ounces of stock solution to each bottle and
refrigerate. If you do eight bottles at a time, you'll use up the quart. When
feeding time comes along, add 2 ounces of boiling water to a bottle. This way
you achieve the correct dilution of milk to water, and you warm the cold milk
at the same time. To do it this way, you need a large supply of bottles and
must keep track of the actual amount the baby is drinking, thus ensuring
sufficient supplementation.

The amount of supplement has to be adjusted to the amount of milk actually
consumed by the baby. Whether the baby drinks half a quart of stock solution
a day or a quart of stock solution a day, the amount of folic acid and iron
consumed in a day has to meet the RDA. Therefore, there is no standard amount
of liquid vitamin that you add to each quart of milk. It must change with the
total amount of formula that your growing infant drinks daily.

These instructions are for an infant under 6 months of age, for whom the milk
should be diluted 2/3 milk to 1/3 water (4 oz of stock solution and 2 oz of
boiling water). Undiluted goat milk is too thick and the baby can become
dehydrated without the additional water. For babies above 6 months of age,
you can gradually go to the goat milk stock solution full strength. Simply
begin adding less and less water to the bottles. And remember, never heat a
baby's bottle in a microwave.

end of quote. so many things bother me about this that i can hardly begin,
but just these vague instructions remind me of how formula companies managed
to create a market by providing a product that did not require all this
"cooking." who could follow this? also, do you think that this graduate
chemistry student thinks adding boiling water will sterilize the stuff
sufficiently? i keep thinking of how my eye doctor's office says, don't ever
rinse your contacts in tap water, it is full of stuff you don't want in your
eye.

and what could be in the bifido and vitamins just curls my hair, to use a
more polite expression. et cetera! so give me more ammunition, i would like
to recommend to the midwives association that they adopt lll's stance on abm,
that is, we don't recomment them, consult your health care practictioner,
etc.

thanks for hearing my long rant. this is the only thing that has ever
provoked an argument between myself and my best friend, who incidentally
caught my baby for me a mere four years ago.

carol brussel

ps thanks kathryn for including your letter to newsweek. i say go girl go!
give 'em heck!