Magda asks: > >Are we breastfeeding centred, woman centred or breast milk centred? Seems >to me >that individuals come down in different places and sometimes I know I come >down >in slightly different places at different times. If one is breast milk centred >-- and I have read plenty of posts on Lactnet that suggest this orientation -- >making it easy for women who don't want to breastfeed to get human milk for >their babies is common sense. Interesting post, M, but I think I'd say that making it easier for women to get banked human milk is being woman-centred - and I am one of those who are woman-centred, more often than anything else, in my practice. I am truly sad, on a personal level, if an individual woman wants to give breast milk in this way, because she and her baby are missing out on the relationship of breastfeeding. But she may have her own reasons, and if she has access to all the aspects, then so be it. This certainly happened when milk banks were more common in the UK - I have no idea if it still does happen. Pre-term and sick babies whose mothers did not want to breastfeed were given donated human milk (free in the UK, of course) while they were in special care. I donated milk myself to the milk bank, knowing that most of it was actually used in this way. I don't recall that human milk was ever an option when the baby was discharged from the hospital - but that might have been priorities and practicalities. Of course one would want the mother to be counselled and encouraged and enabled to give her own milk, but some really don't want to do it. The counselling, encouraging and enabling is, however, still done very poorly and inconsistently in too many special care baby units. Heather Welford Neil NCT bfc Newcastle upon Tyne UK *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html