I've known for most or all of my professional life that good breastfeeding is linked to good birth, and I've probably always given the connection lip service.  But it really hit home for me - hard - when I put together a talk on birthing and parenting in other mammals and realized that in *every other mammal* a ruined birth leads almost inevitably to damaged parenting.  We humans get around it reasonably well by overriding impulse with intellect, as this mother is doing following a surprise c-section: 

"I feel as though I adopted Jason but he is not biologically mine...  I don't know what happened to the bump on my belly and I have no idea where this child came from...  But *he* seems to think I'm his mother, so I will go with that.  I don't know if/how normal birth might have changed things, but the more we nurse, the more I believe he's my kid."

I'm not interested in becoming a midwife or doula or expert on birth.  But I feel as if I finally "get" that if we can't reclaim normal birth we will always have a formula-feeding culture of detached parenting.  

Are we perhaps in the position of the US revolutionary-era Continental Congressmen - people of varying passions and purposes who needed to pull together for a while?  Ben Franklin said, "We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately."  Once we've truly begun to win both the birth and breastfeeding cultural wars, we can afford birth forums that ignore breastfeeding and breastfeeding forums that ignore birth.  But maybe in the meantime, Lactnet needs to include some modest ongoing level of birth discussion, whether or not breastfeeding is mentioned in it, just so we all remember where breastfeeding and parenting start?  I think we have that now, and I'd like to see it continue.  Not as an equal focus, of course, but as the quiet, constant matrix on which we all hang together.

Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC  Ithaca, NY  USA
www.wiessinger.baka.com

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