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From:
Rachel Myr <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Lactation Information and Discussion <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 15 Mar 2011 20:49:34 -0400
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I'm catching up from last week. Somehow I got behind from Wednesday on. :-)   
Here, the word is 'ammepoliti' which means breastfeeding police.  My daughter's doctor told her at her very first prenatal check that the community midwife she had made an appointment with was 'for sure' a member of the BF police.  Just before that he had been astounded because she'd managed to get an appointment with a midwife before week 24, as there is a shortage of them where she was living them.  She told him the midwife was a friend of her mother, but I don't think she disclosed that I was a midwife.  Her response when he used the police term was to say 'Well of course she is, that's where my mother knows her from'  at which point he told her that BF is all very well but not everyone manages to do it and she shouldn't feel bad if she's one of them because you are just as good a mother if you don't breastfeed.  
She waited til he was finished and said 'YOU really don't need to worry about MY breastfeeding.'  End of conversation.
If someone asks if you are a breastfeeding N*** you could say 'I don't know, perhaps you could describe one and we can see if I fit the bill'   But to be flaunted to a group of people you don't know yet, in such a derisive and belittling way, as Heather was, is harder.  You are at a disadvantage before you even say anything.  If you protest, you are strident, and if you don't, you're ashamed at yourself for lack of guts.  When a professor did something similar to me early in the semester I made sure never to bring up breastfeeding again, not easy in a class on public health epidemiology.  The last time he pointed me out to someone and said something about how we'd never be at a loss for breastfeeding topics in class, I said 'in fact, the last 5 times breastfeeding has been mentioned here, you were the one who brought it up.'  He was surprised, and he hadn't realized it himself.  And that was the last time he harrassed me about it. I say harrassed because it was harassment.
In some circumstances I am happy to be the BF police - policing the health services to make sure they don't end up violating the WHO code, or to make sure other staff members don't let their personal attitudes get in the way of respectful, individualized care.
Meanwhile, in the privacy of my home, the BF Mafia is a term of endearment and refers to the network of people I can contact to get someone a place to stay overnight in a city I don't know, or to be nice to a new mother, or to carry esoteric boat electronics in their luggage from Australia to England where we are meeting at a conference, to avoid long waits for overseas shipping, or to get hold of an article we can't find anywhere.  We use it to describe a network with high cohesiveness forged by a common interest in breastfeeding,  but useful for things far removed from breasts and babies, and it has nothing to do with organized crime.  
I would rather be called names that imply that I know a lot about breastfeeding, than experience the shockingly demeaning treatment from a professor of medicine who works in my hospital.  It was in a meeting with three colleague peers and three superiors, plus physicians from three specialty services.  I was asked to describe the clinical findings typically seen with tongue tie and explain why they cause the kind of skin damage and inadequate feeding they do.  I explained as best I could, as it has been explained to me by Cathy Genna at a conference.  When I finished he sat there staring at me and said he didn't understand, he didn't see how you could turn breastfeeding into something so academic and he didn't understand a thing.  Minutes before he had criticized me because the UK NICE guidelines, the ABM guidelines and the National Breastfeeding Center's guidelines for assessment and treatment of TT I had brought to the meeting, called to devise a strategy for appropriate referrals to ENT in case of tongue tie, were not 'scientific' enough to use as evidence to inform care (he didn't have anything even remotely comparable to replace my sources).  I counted to five and asked which part of the explanation he didn't get, and he said 'I don't see how you can know all this, when people who actually *have* a clue, don't know it.'   The very very worst part of that episode was that no one else present said a word on my behalf - not my boss, or her boss, or the pediatrician I have known for 15 years, nor the professional development midwife, nor my three colleagues in the BF clinic.  I think I might even rather be called a mass murderer than be called clueless about breastfeeding in that setting.  It was more than a year ago and I have not recovered yet, I still feel nauseated when I think about it.  Not for what it did to me, but because it was so revealing about the power structures in play in hospitals, when one professional group can behave atrociously, disregarding every rule in the book, and their word is still law, while other professionals can be as blemish-free as the driven snow and never get heard because they don't have the right alphabet soup after their names.

Gee, wasn't planning this as a rant but by golly, there it is!ยจ
Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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