I've been on vacation and far away from my computer, and since I got home
there has been too much temptation outdoors.  Thus I have just skimmed the
archives for all of July.  Have not even tried to read all the threads in
depth, so I will surely have skipped many relevant posts.
The thread on supporting mothers vs making a living, with Magda's cogent
comments on how it all looks from outside the US, intrigues me as usual.  
Before I moved to a country with an actual safety net to ensure that no one
would lose their home just because they lost their job or their health, I
couldn't really imagine what that looked like.  Even though my mother was a
health planner and an economist, born, raised and educated in the US.  She
wrote her Master's thesis in about 1947, on national health insurance for
the US and when she died nearly 40 years later, there was still no such
animal.  I was only born at all because my folks were in Oslo to study and
decided that they could afford to have me while they were on the Norwegian
national health insurance plan.  Growing up, we had health coverage under
the Rochdale plan, in a cooperatively run company where the doctors were on
fixed salaries and worked hard for it.  
I still had the same coverage when we moved here, and had had a baby on the
plan myself.  I've said it before but must repeat it here: that hospital,
because of its financing, had the lowest intervention rates in labor of any
hospital in greater Seattle, and they didn't give out gift packs with
formula in them either.  
I did the math, and confirmed that the combined expenses of taxes plus
whatever our employers were paying for our health care coverage, was about
equal to what I now pay in taxes.  Even though I make less in US dollars
than those of you who work in the US, and even though my living expenses are
higher on almost every level, it is still I who come to visit my friends in
the US, not the other way round.  I consider it a privilege to have the kind
of income that enables me to support the publicly funded safety net through
my taxes.  We lack nothing whatsoever in the material world and we have the
freedom to choose how to meet our spiritual needs as well.  I am paid by the
state, who ultimately owns all maternity facilities in the country, to
provide help to mothers struggling with various aspects of breastfeeding.
In order to make a living I do not need to have any kind of relationship,
friendly or otherwise, to any commercial entity whose target group is new
parents.  For this I am more deeply grateful than I can say.
In all the discussion I have read on LN about the problems with BRU renting
breast pumps, there has been a notable silence on the problems inherent when
an IBCLC doubles as a pump provider.  
Thus, my question:  How does the woman know that the LC is recommending she
get hold of a pump because the woman in fact needs it?
Did anyone read the post I revived from Archive Oblivion, by Barbara Wilson
Clay, on what it did to her practice when she decided to drop the pump
related stuff and concentrate fully on breatfeeding?
Rachel Myr
Way too sleepy for this in Kristiansand, Norway

 "I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that
whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the
terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath
everything. Otherwise it is false."  --Ernest Becker

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