Pam wrote:

 >It never ceases to amaze me that the feminist don't see breast milk as 
a uniquely female product, that by diminishing it, they are diminishing 
 >themselves.

Imagine if you yourself had failed at a basic maternal behavior --  
breastfeeding -- and then had to feed your child formula from a bottle. 
  You know intellectually that breastfeeding is better and wanted 
desperately to do it.  But now you have failed and your child will not 
get the best.

Every time someone mentions how great breastfeeding is, it brings up 
that pain.  You develop a protective mechanism -- denial -- so that you 
won't feel pain every time you feed a bottle or hear someone talk about 
breastfeeding.   Your own child is so wonderful and you love her so 
much, that you just can't hear anything that makes her sound "not as 
good" as breastfed babies.  So you look for evidence that breastfeeding 
is not all it's cracked up to be (no pun intended!!!).  It's pretty 
easy to find one breastfed baby that is sickly, or one formula fed baby 
who is the picture of health, so you latch on to that (sorry!) to 
reassure yourself that you didn't miserably fail your child.  You are 
practically forced to devalue breastfeeding and  human milk because 
it's just too painful or enraging to feel that you and your child have 
lost out on something precious and irreplaceable.

Another scenario is a mother who grows up without any positive 
breastfeeding role models, wasn't breastfed herself, and just can't see 
herself doing it.  She hears that breastmilk is "best," but if she 
accepts this to be true then she either has to do something she is 
deeply uncomfortable with or be a "bad" mother -- so she takes the path 
of least resistance of brushing off the importance of breastfeeding.  
Kind of like how I brush off the importance of eating lots of dark 
leafy green vegetables ;-)

It's like the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance -- the discomfort that 
people feel when asked to learn something that conflicts with what they 
already "know."  In fact, that describes perfectly what happens when 
you try to tell people how important breastfeeding is for maternal and 
infant health; they just can't accept it, because if it were THAT 
important, why wouldn't the medical establishment and the government be 
banning formula giveaways and making breastfeeding help a priority?  
Why wouldn't everyone be doing it?


----
Lynnette Hafken, MA, IBCLC
Board Certified Lactation Consultant
Nurslings Lactation Services
http://www.nurslings.com
240-888-2123

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