Wendey writes:

<< I think if someone *truly* believed what a serious health issue this is
choosing to bottle/formula feed "just because it's my womanly right to" would
be seen as totally ludicrous and the height of selfishness, immaturity, and
as a lack of readiness to be a parent. >>

Whoa!   I don't think anybody is saying to bottlefeed JUST because it is
their right not to.   Rather they are saying that, in their considered
opinion of their own lives, they actually do have lots and lots of reasons to
bottle feed, and that our assertions of the health benefits do not persuade
them that we appropriately understand their cost-benefit calculus in their
own lives.

I'll give you a for-instance.   A while back I interviewed a prominent older
African American woman who has written books on the black family about her
own bf experience [she had bf her son briefly but gave up "because I didn't
have enough milk" which seemed to amount to insufficient family and cultural
support].   Near the end of that interview I asked what bf advocates could do
to help encourage black women to bf, since, I said, black life expectancy in
the US was lower and...   But at this point she sat up, shot lightening at me
from her eyes, and exclaimed, "Black people in America die younger because of
institutionalized racism, and if you think blaming black mothers for that
differential is..."

In other words, while she totally AGREED with my assessment of the increased
risks of not being bf, she DISAGREED with my assessment of how significant
those risks were relative to the overall picture of women's lives.   For her
and in her opinion for many black women in America (as she made clear in that
discussion) factors of body modesty, focus on paid work as the most important
component of responsibility to one's children, diffused (rather than
one-on-one) childcare within families, and others were all strong reasons NOT
to bf, and all had to be balanced against what she saw as the
real-but-not-revolutionary health improvements that would accrue from giving
up artificial feeding.

I don't mean to get into a specific argument here about black mothers and bf,
which is an interesting and complicated subject -- in fact, Linda Blum's
book, which started this discussion, dwells on this at length -- I know that
there are folks on Lactnet with whom I have talked about this before who
variously do and do not agree with this particular interviewee about the
african American community.

Rather, my point here is just that we need to not oversimplify the political
side of this calculus in each mother's life.    Perceiving yourself oppressed
-- correctly or incorrectly -- is far more complicated, and usually far more
intelligent, than "choosing to bottle/formula feed "just because it's my
womanly right to"."    I happen to have heard this from a black mother; but I
bet that every group of mothers who don't bf, or who wean early, can give you
a similar calculus.   People are not such stupid judges of what matters in
their own lives, and it is patronizing in us to think that with a little
information we are going to drop the scales from their eyes.

Elisheva Urbas
cultivating the Keatsian quality of negative capability in self and others in
NYC

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