>I see this comment or something like it several times a week and it still
ruffles my feathers. *My baby is 3 weeks old and I pump 3 times/day. So my
husband can feed the baby the expressed milk in bottles. I am glad I am
pumping, because it gives my husband and our other children a chance to
really bond with the baby by bottle-feeding them......*
........I don't know
if I could trust a 2 year old to bottle feed my baby.<

I don't think this is just an American phenomenon, sadly.  A few years ago I
was taught some English to a Kossovar refugee (she came to England 7 months
pregnant and needed some emergency phrases -- I taught her husband how to
phone 999 and get an ambulance when she was in labour).  She did breastfeed
for a little bit, then switched.  I remember seeing her not-quite-2 year old
feeding the baby, while the baby was lying flat in the moses basket.  Seems
like the bad stuff is easy to export.  My student's mother (baby's
grandmother) was still wearing traditional turkish style trousers and a
headscarf, and supporting her daughter, but the bottle is one of the first
pieces of 'technology' to hit cultures.

Depressing, ain't it.

In today's Saturday magazine with The Guardian (newspaper) there is a story
about Americans who want reparations for slavery.  The man interviewed was
wearing a t-shirt with a photograph of a southern slave family and the woman
was breastfeeding her baby.  The message, I wondered "we were so bad off
then, we had to *breastfeed*"???  Who knows.

Magda Sachs
Breastfeeding Supporter, BfN, UK

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