The High Tech Way

Myths about breastfeeding

My mother-in-law tells the story of how neither she nor her mother were able to breastfeed their children.

Her mother was told by the doctor that her milk was not rich enough, so the children were put on formula.

And my mother-in-law herself suffered from a damaged nipple when she tried to breastfeed her first babe.  She thought her nipples just weren't tough enough and went to formula.  She also tells about how hard it was with each new baby (there were four) finding the right formula that the baby was not allergic to.  You can tell it is a topic that upsets her.

Breastfeeding today and in recent history has been in the uncomfortable position of being usurped by current medical wisdom.  These kinds of myths are why older women don't know how to breastfeed and cannot show younger women how it is done. Instead we rely on lactation consultants in hospitals who talk to us for 15 minutes, determine our problems, offer a potential solution and send us on our way.  They are not in a position to know who we are, what our ongoing issues might be, or to perhaps remember our names or circumstances when we phone for follow-up help. 

Rather, we are left in a position of being our own advocate but not being an expert.  We are presented with limited information and left to make a decision which may be overruled by the medical establishment anyway.   And all this while we are mentally altered by hormones and sleep deprivation at least and hormones, sleep deprivation, narcotics, and post-partum depression at most.

Really, I wonder if the hospital system of encouraging women to breastfeed, while well-meaning, is actually sometimes undermining the attempts of women to get on the right track with breastfeeding. So many different messages are delivered by so many different individuals.  A new mom is looking for a mentor, but she gets a series of sound-bites instead.

And there is an undercurrent of unexpressed disagreement between doctors and lactation consultants over many issues  -- how much should be fed, how certain problems should be treated, etc.  But no one will say that there is any disagreement at all.  Everyone walks a careful diplomatic line. Maybe the LCs are afraid of being ousted from the hospital if they publicly disagree with what the doctors say. Maybe the doctors are afraid of seeming not supportive of breastfeeding. 

Whatever it is, it is not helping the new moms.  And really, in a system where people are pushed through like widgets in a factory, with each worker so focused on his or her own task, I'm not sure that any of these folks recognize there is a problem with the big picture.

Breastfeeding caste system?

While I was pregnant with Jack, the best parenting class I went to at the local hospital was the one on breastfeeding.  It was packed with useful information that made me feel more confident unlike some other classes which either bored me or scared me.

The LC who led the class was the chief LC at that hospital, and on the scale LC and breastfeeding zealots, she was a moderate.  Sure, she was passionate about the importance of breastfeeding and how to make it happen.  But she was a realist.  She understood that we all did not live in a perfect world where everyone had water births at home without medical intervention, where our milk came in quickly and our nipples weren't inverted or flat. She didn't blame the mom for breastfeeding problems.  Indeed, when describing some of the other attendees at lactation consultant conventions she described the zealots as those who "think you should never use a bottle and should nurse until the child goes off to college."

Don't get me wrong. I am a big believer in breastfeeding and breast milk for all babies (although I would prefer that it be commonly called "human milk" instead of breast milk.  Do we call cow's milk "udder milk"?).  Hell, I got no more than four hours of sleep per day for months and months so I could feed my baby breast milk.

But it troubles me tremendously to read stories like this about how Mothering Magazine's forums refused to let an exclusively pumping mom to list her EPing supplies -- bottles -- for sale on the site because they go against the publication's philosophy of promoting breastfeeding. Bullshit.  EPers work harder than any other breastfeeder to get that milk to their babies.  Shame on them for creating a caste system where mothers who can nurse are treated well while mothers who exclusively pump are treated like second class citizens.  That is zealotry at its worst.            

Why is U.S. Maternity Leave policy close to the worst in the world? (Yes, the WORST!)

While politicians here in the United States pontificate about the importance of "family values," they fail to support families with policy.

Case in point: the United States has the crappiest maternity leave policy of any industrialized nation.

From this story:

With little public debate, the United States has chosen a radically different approach to maternity leave than the rest of the developed world. The United States and Australia are the only industrialized countries that don't provide paid leave for new mothers nationally, though there are exceptions in some U.S. states.

Australian mothers have it better, however, with one year of job-protected leave. The U.S. Family and Medical Leave Act provides for 12 weeks of job-protected leave, but it only covers those who work for larger companies.

To put it another way, out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United States in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

This article goes on to look at some possible reasons behind this discrepency (a different approach by feminists in the U.S. than feminists in Europe towards "mother" issues), and also looks at some efforts to fix this problem. In addition, it offers some of the reasons behind why such efforts to fix it have not been successful (money, and fear of putting more burden on employers).

This chart offers a pretty good summary of maternity leave policies around the world. You really ought to click on it and take a look, because it is kind of almost unbelievable how the U.S. stacks up, or doesn't, to anywhere else.

There is no paid leave in the United States. There are 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave -- if you have been with your company for a year and if that company has 50 or more employees.

Unpaid leave is difficult to afford for even the best-paid moms, as in the case of this attorney who had $20 left in her checking account by the time she went back to work.

Here are some quick examples, pulled from the chart, of places with better maternity leave policies than the United States:

Moms in Mexico get 12 weeks at 100 percent pay. Cuban moms get 18 weeks at 100 percent pay. Canadian moms get 55 percent of their pay for 15 weeks. Guatemalan moms get 12 weeks of full pay.

In Japan, another country of workaholics, moms are paid 60 percent of their pay for 14 weeks. In Korea, a country also known for its extreme work ethic, moms get full pay for 60 days.

In China moms get full pay for 90 days. In Israel its 12 weeks at 75 percent of pay.

Now this doesn't mean that individual states and companies in the United States don't have more generous policies.  The state I live in offers 6 weeks of partially paid leave and my company offers 6 weeks of fully paid leave (or 8 weeks if you had a c-section).

But, come on.  We claim to care about families and children.  Yet our materinity leave policy as a nation is worse than that of Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan (and so many others).

The only reason why we even get the 12 weeks of unpaid leave (under the Family Medical Leave Act) is because Bill Clinton signed it into law in 1993 when he was president. Without Clinton's work, we wouldn't even have any unpaid leave here at all. It's utterly appalling.

Women here often end up using all their sick days, vacation days, etc. trying to piece together enough paid time off so they can spend 6 weeks at home with their babies before returning to work.

Handing my little boy over to daycare after just 12 weeks of maternity leave was really really hard.  I can't imagine doing it after 6 weeks.  And we would have gone broke if we'd hadn't had any paid leave (that was thankfully offered by my company).

When we say "no child left behind" we are really offering a big spin marketing message with no substance at all. Why haven't we made moms and children a priority?

The United States figured out how to send a man to the moon, it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a war in Iraq, it offers millions of dollars in aid to countries that offer better maternity leave policies than it offers its own mothers.  The United States is home to brilliant scholars and scientists and engineers and problem solvers.  Where is the attention to this issue?  Why aren't we REALLY working to fix this?