JOhanna says, about Katha Pollitt's piece in The Nation:
"However, she has some very negative things to say about breastfeeding and
"all of us."

'Advocates of breast-feeding [sic] have done a good job of making women feel
guilty if they don't opt for it, but there's a reason that it's mostly
prosperous women who choose it and stick with it.'"

Well, I checked out the article, and I have to say that I agree with most of
what Katha Pollitt said - much of it is the same thing I've been ranting
about for years! As for the "making women feel guilty if they don't opt for
it" bit, I'm just not gonna rise to that bait one more time! My impression
from reading the entire article is that this one little phrase is just not
that important, and her broader point in the paragraph that contains that
sentence is better covered by the following:

"You need a lot of information and a lot of support, and we're not living in
villages where these things are part of the social fabric, where
breast-feeding (sic) is a part of life and every woman is able to instruct
new mothers. Even well-off, well-educated women can run into trouble without
realizing it."

Which is a point that many of us here on lactnet, who work in many different
settings and environments, agree on, and in fact make ourselves, over and
over again. The bigger guilt question that Pollitt raises in her piece is
the legitimate guilt that all of us share in, in our collective failure to
prevent this sad happening. Pollitt speaks about the blame that is
immediately attached to the mother alone, and for which she alone is
prosecuted - not to the baby's father, not to the baby's grandparents who
also saw the baby regularly, not to the clinic where the baby wasn't seen
because it didn't have a medicaid card. She categorizes the thing as "a
tragedy set in motion by ignorance, poverty, social isolation and a
deliberate policy of depriving the city's needy of social services". Amen to
that!

I'm not willing to leap on the Tabitha Walrond bandwagon, because I really
don't know enough about her particular case to sit in judgement. But her
treatment in the media and even to some extent on this list echos too
clearly the "Saint or Sinner?" (or in this case, maybe "criminal vs.
victim") view of women that has become so normal in our thinking that we
often don't even notice it. It places women in a no-win position: either she
*is* a witch, in which case she will not sink and drown and will later be
burned or hung for her witch-hood, or she is *not* a witch, in which case
she will drown when thrown in the water. Either way, she is put to death.
Talk about a sacrifice on the altar of ignorance! How about we try looking
at women just as people - not icons, not all-one or all-the-other way,
neither devils nor angels, madonnas nor whores?

Cathy Bargar, RN, IBCLC Ithaca NY

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