Lovely Links I Like!
Dou-la-la writes about lactivists, and issues that arise when asking and offering breastfeeding advice.
“When a woman is unwilling to breastfeed, but tells people she was unable, it inflates statistics and seeds fear in other women that breastfeeding is an unreachable ideal for most women.”
Yes.
Thank you.
There IS a flip side to that – and I can already feel the murmurs. In order for women to feel safe about publicly admitting that they were simply not willing to breastfeed, and that it was a choice, not some failure of their anatomy or – another frequent claim – “refusal” by their child*, we, as a breastfeeding advocacy community, need to be able to accept those choices and not condemn or harass these mothers who have made different choices.
Also, along the lines of breastfeeding, HERE is the info on the new law that provides pumping breaks for breastfeeding mothers.
Employers are required to provide “reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for her nursing child for 1 year after the child’s birth each time such employee has need to express the milk.” Employers are also required to provide “a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public, which may be used by an employee to express breast milk.”
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Going along with my previous unassisted childbirth post, here are a couple more!
Preparing for an Unassisted Homebirth
Don’t Condemn Unassisted Births Because of 1 Tragedy by Rixa over at Stand and Deliver.
I’m not saying unassisted birth is perfectly safe, just think happy thoughts and nothing will ever go wrong, la la la. But condemning all unassisted birth–childbirth, after all, is a normal, inevitable physiological event, not a medical procedure–because of one tragic “dumpster baby” is way off the mark.
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Don’t Judge Pregnant Women Based on Junk Science
This is especially true when it comes to pregnant drug using women. For nearly two decades popular media claimed that any illegal drugs used by pregnant women would inevitably and significantly damage their babies.
The actual scientific research contradicts this assumption. Carefully constructed, unbiased scientific research has not found that prenatal exposure to any of the illegal drugs causes unique or even inevitable harm. This research is so clear that that courts and leading federal agencies have concluded that what most people heard was “essentially a myth.” As the National Institute for Drug Abuse explains, “babies born to mothers who used crack cocaine while pregnant, were at one time written off by many as a lost generation. . . . It was later found that this was a gross exaggeration.”
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The Feminist Breeder writes “A Birth Plan is More Than a Wish List”:
The birth plan may not be a legal document, but mother’s desires during her birth are her legal right. Yes, a mother can Just Say No to anything she is uncomfortable with during her labor, and the Birth Plan is the first draft of that assertion.
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All through history, sharing breastmilk was seen as normal, and sometimes the only way for babies to survive. Many moms had a wet nurse, or relied on another woman every now and then to nurse their children, which is known as cross-nursing. Now-a-days, if a woman is unable to breastfeed her child, she usually turns to formula. Donor milk from a milk bank is another option, but is very expensive if you have to pay out-of-pocket. Still, there is an alternative way to nurse a child that more and more women are turning to, which is known as milk sharing. The benefits of breastmilk are plenty, and many mothers feel strongly that even if they cannot supply all of their breastmilk for their baby, that they should still be able to receive the benefits of breastmilk.
