So my dear husband has been telling me I need to blog, maybe he’s tired of listening to me rant, or maybe he really thinks I have good things to say. I’ll just believe the second. But what really inspired me to start was two posts I read elsewhere on the Web this weekend. The first was your standard whining about “Breastfeeding Nazis”. First anyone who uses the term Nazi lightly shouldn’t be published. The title Nazi should never be used for referring to anything that is not a horrific crime against humanity, something I don’t think anyone should claim a breastfeeding advocate to be no matter how overly enthusiastic they might be. They may be annoying but they do not want to commit mass murder to hundred’s of thousands of people, even people who choose not to breastfeed.
Now that I’ve got that off my chest (no pun intended) the second post I read was a wonderful response to the first type of poster, to quote ” Those who think that society has “gone too far” in supporting breastfeeding, that mothers who formula feed are demonized and breastfeeding mothers aren’t:” If you haven’t read this you should, it’s excellent viv.id.au/blog/20090625.5497/gone-too-far/
What saddens me much more then how a mother chooses to feed her baby is the pressures society puts on all moms regardless of the choices they make. Instead if we all worked together to look at the science and our history and find the choices that were the healthiest for our children and SUPPORT them we could fix many of societies ills instead of increase them by making parents feel bad. We know that breastfeeding makes mothers and babies healthier. We know that keeping mothers and babies together from birth helps them to bond. We know that babies belong in arms for the majority of the first year of their lives. History has proven this, science has proven this, the number of people with severe emotional and physcological problems today has proven this but instead of helping women to feel empowered to be the kind of great mothers that will raise great children we try and help them make excuses not to breastfeed, not be be with and hold their babies, not to listen to thier child’s cries and respond – “so they can have a life”, “so they can have a career” … Instead of letting moms find how wonderful it is to make great choices for their children and watch them thrive, we devalue what mothers do and make them feel like it is too great a sacrifice to hold their baby when they can be doing something productive like paid work or even cleaning thier house. Let’s stop this before more children suffer and we as a society have to keep asking why youth are getting more violent, more promiscus, more troubled. Let’s realize are babies need to be nurtured and help parents to do this in the healthiest ways.