Boob Bashing Bonanza Hits Fleet Street Again!

Well here we go again, the annual Have a Pop at Breastfeeding Week begins again next week but the Daily Mail has got in there extra early with a corker of an article slating the Breastfeeding Gestapo - an idle angle on the Nipple Nazi tag of previous years. In any other profession but journalism you would be honour bound to at least debrief your own previous experience so that it didn't impair your professional judgement but Fleet Street seems to attract women with such bitter personal experiences of birth and breastfeeding that they are no longer able to differentiate between fact and their own painful memories. Worse, having been let down so horrendously by the medical profession they turn their anger on the charities and volunteers who support women to breastfeed.

I'm tempted begin each breastfeeding class now with "My name is Jenny and I am not a nipple nazi! I promise to continue to show you non judgmental, empathetic support with unconditional positive regard as demanded by the body which has provided me with more training than most midwives, health visitors or doctor you will meet in your parenting career. I will continue to give up my unpaid family time through evenings, weekends and bank holidays when every health professional has shut their surgery to offer you an opportunity to talk to someone who will listen without giving advice and to suggest practical ways to enable you to breasteed if that is what you want to do.

I am not and have never been in the business of telling people how they should parent their children. I have never felt compelled to strut about clicking my heels and ordering women to breastfeed nor have I ever tried to make mothers feel guilty for not breastfeeding. I don't actually believe women who formula feed should EVER feel guilty about not breastfeeding because all too often they have been given woefully inadequate support and information by their health service and have been brought up in a culture that neither values nor supports breastfeeding. Worse still, should they succeed, against the odds, in breastfeeding and wish to go on to support other women they get labelled in national newspapers as The Breastfeeding Gestapo or Nipple Nazis or Lactivists (actually I quite like that one).

I am not however going to lie to you and say that breastfeeding doesn't matter.
It does and there is extensive research to prove that not breastfeeding makes a big difference to mother and baby health but because we are so terrified of 'hurting mothers feelings' and 'making women feel guilty' we misrepresent this routinely as The Benefits of Breastfeeding. So most women think they are being nagged at and pushed to do something that feels alien, that their mother probably didn't do and which doesn't feel normal, never mind natural and whose value they do not clearly understand.

I do know what it feels like to give up breastfeeding, to feel like a Bad Mother, a failure for turning to formula feeding but the blame for that lays squarely with the health professionals who didn't give me accurate information or the skills to do the job, with society for destroying our breastfeeding culture in order to make money out of formula milk and yes, with myself for not informing myself of where to get accurate information support.

As a first time mother, I spent more time looking at buggies than I did finding out about how breastfeeding works and how to get good quality support locally if I was struggling. I have let myself off the guilt hook as I was terribly naive then about how the NHS works and I thought that if they were prepared to spend thousands of pounds on producing posters and pens telling me how MARVELLOUS breastfeeding is, they'd have spent a couple of quid on training their staff and putting enough of them in a town near me so that I'd have an evens chance of success. And when on New Year's Eve I sat sobbing with bleeding nipples and no midwife due to come for 3 days and no idea at all how anyone could help me it was no wonder that the lure of the 24 hour Tesco with its formula solution proved all too much.

It wasn't until 3 years later, expecting my second child sat in an NCT class - I hadn't done them first time around - that I discovered several things that all potential lactactors should know:

1- Your health service almost certainly doesn't have enough qualified personnel to support you through the early days of breastfeeding if all is not going well and you should not rely solely on this.

2 - You probably have a network of trained, expert volunteers near you which you can access free of charge. This is more difficult in London and may partly explan why most journalists on national newspapers do not seem to breastfeed but it helps if you do your research while pregnant so you are not trying to find good quality support when you are frantic with a screaming baby.

3 - Breastfeeding works very well for a lot of women BUT if you experience some of the problems there is no substitute for a qualified and experienced pair of eyes to have a look at positioning which causes about 90% of the problems in the early weeks.

4 - Breastfeeding should not hurt. Sore, cracked and bleeding nipples are not normal but if someone can help you correct baby's position then they can get better very quickly. Do not believe anyone who tells you the baby's position is right if it is hurting you, get another opinion.

5 -The vast majority of women can produce enough milk for their baby but they may have to adjust their expectations of how they will parent to accommodate the normal behaviour of a breastfeeding baby. We no longer understand what normal behaviour is because we have grown up in a bottlefeeding culture - so the breastfeeding baby who feeds hourly or cluster feeds for four hours of an evening or who wants to be carried all day or who prefers to co-sleep is seen as abnormal, a problem to be fixed.

6- It's OK to ask for help. In an ideal world we would have wise women all around us, mothers, aunts, grandmothers and friends who would all have breastfed or still be breastfeeding their own babies. We would have grown up watching other women sort out the common niggles and would not be surrounded by well meaning people who bottlefed and are managing their own feelings about it and who may not be entirely unbiased when they say "Oh just give him a bottle, it never did you any harm." Organisations like the NCT, La Leche League, the Breastfeeding Network are there trying to stick a nipple in the gaping hole caused by 30 years of relentless marketing of formula and the resultant loss of societal knowledge and shared experience of breastfeeding.

7- Not all health professionals are well trained about breastfeeding and not all counsellors or supporters have the same training. Midwifery and health visitor training about breastfeeding is improving, particularly if your local NHS hospital or trust is involved in the BabyFriendly Initiative but knowledge and skills and resources may be limited so do a bit of research beforehand to discover who is in your area. GP's have widely varying knowledge about breastfeeding. Almost without exception health professionals are not offered an opportunity to debrief their own experience and their own baggage can impact on the advice they profer.
Peer supporters or breast mates or breast buddies or whatever they are called are local mums who have breastfed and who have had 2-3 hours of training. This is not the same as a qualified breastfeeding counsellor who will have trained for 2- 3 years and an accredited qualification. That is not to say that a peer supporter can't do a fantastic job of listening and supporting but you may need more in-depth knowledge than that.

8. Breastfeeding does matter. Sometimes your circumstances make it extraordinarily difficult or your choices become extremely limited through absolutely no fault of yours. Women mother these days under all sorts of pressures and with very little suport. But the reason that we have Unicef working in this country to increase our breastfeeding rates, the reason that government gives its mealy mouthed support to Breastfeeding Awareness Week, the reason that the World Health Organisation, the NHS, La Leche League, the NCT promote breastfeeding is NOT because of some nostalgic, rosy tinted longing for the return of some mystic ideal but because as a society we would be so much healthier if babies were breastfed. Fact. And if you didn't manage to breastfeed it probably isn't your fault - but it isn't breastfeeding's fault either and it most definitely isn't the fault of your local breastfeeding supporter.

All of which is why I'll still plug on, offering my support to women both locally and on the national line run by the NCT because I'm trying to make a difference to the few I can help . I do this not because I'm some superior being trying to live out some superior race fantasy but because I was once that mum crying on the sofa who did get warm, non judgmental, mother to mother support from a volunteer when she most needed it.