The whole discussion of breastfeeding militants is both interesting and 
confounding to me. What I am hearing is that those of us who hold the 
medical model accountable and believe that women have the right to know 
the consequences of medicalization must be militant.

The argument that used to prove that we are militant is to put forth 
examples of women who would be put off or in some way disempowered or 
"made to feel guilty" if they were "pressured" by we LC's to 
exclusively breastfeed. This kind of argument is always a smoke screen, 
b/c no one would ever advocate for the kind of unloving, inconsiderate 
behavior that is used in such examples.

On the other hand, I have seen countless women pressured, cajoled, 
guilted and threatened (as Lee addresses in her post about her own 
daughter) into every kind of medical intervention one could possibly 
imagine, from induction to cesarean to monitoring to "non"-stress 
tests, to supplementation w/ AIM and on and on. Some of the same people 
on Lactnet who have argued that women who refuse such interventions are 
making poor decisions, are rigid and are acting against the best 
interests of their own babies, argue that we should tread lightly when 
it comes to breastfeeding. What interests me is that we have 
incontrovertible evidence as to the risks of even one bottle of AIM and 
we have precious little evidence that obstetric interventions are in 
any way beneficial, if not useless to dangerous in almost all 
situations. So, how is it that we do not call these practitioners 
"militant medicalizers", but we call LC's who strongly advocate for 
breastfeeding militant?

I would argue that it has little to do with what women want or how 
uncommitted women are or with the directives of one's culture, unless 
we mean the culture of the medical model. When ask for example why 
women want epidurals or AIM supplements, (which is certainly true), we 
are asking the wrong question. I would ask-do women want drugged, 
traumatized, unattached, sick babies? When we fail to educate women 
about the importance of their choices, then we relegate ourselves to a 
pointless conversation in which we never notice that "the emperor has 
no clothes".

I just do not understand the argument, made over and over that we must 
respect a mother's right to make choices. Is there someone out there 
making the opposing argument?  This is creating an opponent who doesn't 
exist in order to rationalize the abdication of responsibility. As I 
have said before, this is the slippery slope that avoids the real 
issues-that we have an obligation to educate, while we are working to 
assist the mother in compensating for the damage that has already been 
done.
Jennifer Tow, IBCLC, CT, USA

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