I was surprised at how deeply sorry I felt upon hearing their news. My anger, sorrow and frustration seemed somehow out of place when confronting a situation that had little bearing on my life. I found myself ranting to friends and family about these breastfeeding failures: why they had happened, how they could have been prevented, what problems potentially lay ahead for the children. One exasperated acquaintance said to me, "Listen, it's not like they're beating their kids. Why are you making such a big deal out of it?"
Why was I? Before becoming a mother (and committed breastfeeder), I worked as an advocate for children escaping domestic violence. The problems I dealt with there seemed so overwhelming, so terrible, that I couldn't understand the intensity with which activists talked about raising breastfeeding rates. "At least these babies are getting fed," I thought. "So what if it's formula." And yet here I was, as passionate and angry as any of the women I once criticized. What in me had changed?
What I came to realize is that the fact that breastfeeding is generally unsupported by our culture is an indicator of how devalued women and children are in our society. That so many women are either ignorant of the dangers of formula feeding or have their breastfeeding efforts sabotaged speaks to how little honor our society gives new mothers and their babies.
Too often, information is withheld from mothers in the guise of being sensitive, thereby making it incredibly difficult for women to make an informed choice. There was a great deal of noise when the American Association of Pediatrics announced their new recommendation that mothers nurse their babies for at least one year and for as long as both baby and child want thereafter. The media (and the National Organization for Women who should have known better) made much of the pronouncement and the concern that it would make some mothers -- especially working mothers -- feel guilty. This is the same kind of reasoning that magazines use when they are sure to present the positive side of formula whenever they talk about breastfeeding. How dare they attempt to keep information from women just to protect our feelings? Isn't the health of our babies more important than how we feel? Mothers turn to formula not knowing that it is a decision that will impact their babies' entire lives because they are not told that this is true. Our power as mothers is stolen from us when we are unable to study the facts ourselves.
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