Nancy Wight wrote, "The breast is an organ of the human body. How can breastfeeding not be a medical issue?". Hear, hear Nancy! I'm a bit late responding, but I've been thinking along the same lines. The health of mother or baby affects breastfeeding/lactation and breastfeeding/lactation affects the health of both mother and baby. It's a health (medical) issue. Furthermore, no matter how much eulogizing there is about the value of home birth and unmedicated deliveries, and women's wisdom, accompanied by lamenting that if we just let Nature take it's course and stopped interfering, both birth and breastfeeding would proceed well - or certainly better without all our interventions, I would ask everyone to take a look at the stats for the least developed areas of the world. What is the maternal mortality rate where most births take place at home? What is the infant mortality rate where most babies are breastfed? The very worst breastfeeding/lactation problems, the worst abscesses, the worst (horrendous) cases of failure to thrive that I have worked with, have been with African mothers and babies for whom breastfeeding was culturally normal, well supported within their families, and everyone had the firm expectation that it would go well. Conversely, my experience is that although birth interventions do negatively affect initiation of breastfeeding, they hardly ever prevent it to the extent that I read about on LACTNET. This begs the question of whether the main "problem" is not bad births, and nipple-confusion, and over-medicalization, but lack of appropriate support for breastfeeding (poor hospital practices and inadequately trained healthcare providers who are able to dispense out-of- date, non-evidence-based medical "advice"). Where are the government regulating agencies who should be DOING something about this?? I've just seen a map of the world showing shaded areas for breastfeeding rates. Amazingly, the industrialized countries (W & N Europe, N America, Canada, Australia) are blank because these countries are somehow not required to report their stats on breastfeeding initiation to the international health agencies. How can this be? Why are the world's health watchdogs turning a blind eye to this omission, instead of requiring reports from all countries, as necessary health indicators? My guess is that it's because bottle-feeding is so much a part of the culture of countries that set international standards that it pleases everyone NOT to characterize breastfeeding as a medical matter. But I think it is. I think the use of formula should be rationalized from a medical perspective. And I think we should all speak with one voice about this. Pamela Morrison IBCLC Rustington, England *********************************************** Archives: http://community.lsoft.com/archives/LACTNET.html Mail all commands to [log in to unmask] To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or [log in to unmask]) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet or ([log in to unmask]) To reach list owners: [log in to unmask]