Sandra Steingraber, in her excellent book "Having Faith," about her first pregnancy/bfing experience (her daughter's name is Faith) raises a point I'd really never thought of before:

Our solution to dealing with contaminated fish is to tell women of childbearing age to stay away from them.  Sure, they're full of good nutrients, but... take the responsibility on your own shoulders and just don't eat them.  Our solution to dealing with more ubiquitous pollutants is not to bring the issue up with pregnant women at all.  In some cases, we've actually stopped monitoring because we don't like what we're finding.  And since women can't avoid certain contamination problems, why point out to them that they're problems at all?  

The onus falls not on the polluter but on the individual to avoid if possible, and to ignore if not possible.  "Yet another stick to beat women with," a phrase Maureen Minchin once used, almost as if the whole issue were somehow our fault and thus our responsibility.  Ah, what an interesting culture we live in!  

Europe, by the way, has done far better than the US in this regard.  According to Sandra, in 1925 there was an international covenant banning lead-based interior paint.  *The US was not a signatory.* (Sound familiar?)  Instead, we came out with the Little Dutch Boy, an image of childhood purity on a paintbucket, precisely to counter the notion that lead and children didn't mix well.  *We* didn't ban lead paint until 1978.  Then there's leaded gas, which we came out with about the time of the research-based international covenant...

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

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