>Pam Morrison made some more good points in her post yesterday.  I'd like to
>add that, according to my reading, during World War II the public health
>provision of National Dried Milk to UK mothers to feed their babies resulted
>in more mothers abandoning breastfeeding.  The reason was that they
>perceived the free food as having government endorsement, i.e. what the
>government wanted them to feed to their babies.  There would also have been
>the issue of missing out on a freebie if they breastfed.


I wonder if this is correct? I think there may be a strand of 
thinking that says 'this is free so it must be good and no one wants 
to miss out on a free gift' but I don't know that we can say this is 
the primary reason why mothers took up the offer.

During WWII, for the first ever time in the UK, in all industrial 
areas, there were state-run nurseries offering free childcare - there 
had to be, to enable mothers to take the place of men in the 
workplace and munitions factories, as from 1939-1940 the majority of 
men under about 40 were serving in the forces (call up ( = 'the 
draft") happened very early on in WWII (they'd learnt from WWI that 
voluntary sign up was a slow way to build  an army, and for this war 
they needed a navy and an airforce, too).  This meant separating 
mothers from babies....ergo, National Dried Milk. It was not to 
ensure 'nourishment in times of hardship'.

>
>Just one example of many of what the gift culture does, even when it started
>out with good intent, i.e. to make sure that artificially-fed babies weren't
>malnourished in times of hardship.


After the war,  NDM continued to be manufactured, and free clinic 
care for mothers and babies was an important part of the new National 
Health Service.  You got your free dried milk (and orange juice) at 
the clinic, and once the 'free formula' genie is out of the bottle, 
it becomes very hard to get it back in again.  Commercially-packaged 
formula took over in the early 60s, still free/low cost to mothers 
who 'needed' it, but of course the state had set the scene 20 years 
before.

Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc, tutor, UK

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