The way I handle this is adapted from my child's very progressive school, in
which any discussion of a new topic starts with two lists:  "What do we know
about X?" and "What do we want to know about X?"

In this case I would make X = infant feeding.

Folks who start their "What do we know" list with "Mother's milk is best" but
also have a line in there about "Not everyone can bf" or "formula is OK too"
already know about the superiority of bf in some sense -- that is, it IS
"speaking for itself" -- but are now ready to hear about the disadvantages of
formula too, so that they understand that the "advantages of bf" are by a
wider margin than they may have realized, relative to the alternative.

On the other hand, those who start off with "babies drink milk from bottles"
or "babies eat by nursing or drinking formula" -- that is, those to whom bf
has not YET "spoken for itself" -- really do need IMO to hear about bf's
fabulousness before they get to the point of comparing it to formula.

But I don't start by its fabulousness by comparison to formula in particular,
because although that is my hearers' context for thinking about bf, it's not
mine, and I want to influence them to a slight shift in THEIR context too.
So I start from the standpoint of all the fabulous things your body does to
adapt to and support your baby.   That means a minute or two on placentas,
etc, then a moment on how incredibly the baby switches over to getting its
oxygen and nutrition by mouth immediately at birth, and then naturally to the
fabulousness of the whole interaction between the baby and your breast.   "As
your baby needs x, your milk will supply y."  Etc.

In other words, the first context for the greatness of bf is in relation to
the coolness of our bodies and our babies -- AF just isn't in the picture at
all at that stage of the conversation.

Then, if we're lucky, that gets these folks to something like the point the
first group were already at.  Once they get why bf is great, its a sort of
parenthetical digression -- but an important one! -- to point out that all
this fabulousness is thrown away if you feed your kid from a jar instead of
straight from the source -- and that throwing away that fabulousness can have
serious health consequences for you and your child.

So two points:
What are they ready to hear?
And, the context of bf is health, not formula, which we need to describe only
once we have established a context of health& bf.

Elisheva Urbas, NYC
always watching my language!

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