It's been interesting to me to compare the two lines of posts about how we
deal with moms whose goals are not our goals.     I have been thinking of them
as the Speak Truth to Power approach, in contrast to the Meet them Where They
Are approach.   At the moment I don't see either as illegitimate, although I
am temperamentally closer to the meet-them-where-they-are crowd, I think.

The important thing is to be honest with ourselves about how we are
approaching our relations with the mothers we advise, and about what our own
priorities are in the particular job each of us has taken on.   Is what you
owe your individual client more important, or is what you owe the world?   I
think that the position that you need to speak harsh truths sometimes probably
gets less human milk into some individual kids, because their mothers just
become persuaded that breastfeeding really IS culturally alien from them and
there's no way that they can do it within a life that they can imagine --after
all, culture is all too real.    But at the same time, without voices
insisting on that deep honesty, reminding us all what is the underlying truth
about what kids need, all of our work struggling to bring moms and babies to a
better place lacks vital context.

A judge I know once told me that his obligation was to the parties before him
and not to any abstraction.   This position has a lot of good in it -- he
wrote his decisions quickly and fairly, and the litigants who came to him for
justice were generally satisfied.   On the other hand, some other judges, who
often took much longer to write opinions and did not necessarily care about
the particular set of facts before them all that much, legitimately complained
that his cases often made bad law -- that his obligation to the parties before
him had obscured his obligation to the whole of society, that needed to live
in a world his decisions had made.    And yet both obligations are real ones,
aren't they?

I guess that the most-pressing obligations of a bf advocate writing, or
speaking in public, or teaching into the culture broadly, may be different
from the most-pressing obligations of a bf advocate sitting in a WIC office
and hired and obligated to help each, individual, baby get the healthiest
start it can.   And the more I think about it the more we need both of these
kinds of teachers to make progress.

Pensive in NYC,
Elisheva Urbas
lay bf contemplator