Well it's not patronising for govt to tell women to breastfeed and then
place barriers (or not remove barriers) that would prevent them from
breastfeeding it's just plain cruel! and that's the line that I would take
in talking about this with people, take the heat off mums and put it onto
others. ie "Yes, breastfeeding is important, yes, not breastfeeding has a
host of adverse health concequences for mothers and babies and costs
government, business and families enormous amounts of money and causes
enormous suffering for babies and mums, not breastfeeding is bad for babies
*but* mothers need to be supported to be enabled to breastfeed....they need
support from their families, they need practical support from their
employers, they need support from govt etc etc" This way breastfeeding
advocates get to be on the side of the mums! As the mum in the Today article
said, she feels badly about not breastfeeding, it wasn't a free "choice" and
we need mums like this to be harnassed into "our" side so that they too will
be demanding support for mums so that they can breastfeed.
Karleen Gribble
Australia

> Hello, all -- the writers of Salon.com's Broadsheet blog informed their r=
> eaders today that they are=20
> working on a long, stand-alone response to yesterday's NY Times article. =
>  They hinted that the=20
> response would be negative, largely because all the letters they have got=
> ten from readers have=20
> been negative.  One response they posted was from a reader who finds it p=
> atronizing that the=20
> government is educating women to breastfeed but not providing reasonable =
> maternity leave.
>

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

To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail
To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest)
To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet
All commands go to [log in to unmask]

The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(R)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html