Thanks goodness for natural childbirth and homebirth advocates. They’ve rediscovered what our ancient ancestors knew all along: women’s bodies are perfectly designed to give birth!

How did they figure it out? They looked at basic facts about childbirth.

Consider:

There is no infertility.

No baby ever dies in childbirth.

No mother ever dies in childbirth.

There are no premature babies.

There are no stillbirths.

There are no miscarriages.

No babies are breech.

No babies are transverse.

There are no twins, triplets or higher order multiples.

No babies are ever too big to fit through the birth canal.

No babies are ever deprived of oxygen during labor.

No babies fail to breathe when they are born.

No babies ever get an infection during labor.

The umbilical cord never prolapses.

The placenta never abrupts.

The placenta never grows over the opening of the cervix.

The placenta is never retained.

The uterus never gets infected.

There is no Rh incompatibility.

There are no birth defects.

No woman ever develops eclampsia.

There is no postpartum hemorrhage.

There are no vaginal tears.

There are no vaginal fistulas.

There is no incontinence after birth.

There is always enough breastmilk.

No breastfed baby ever gets sick.

No breastfed baby ever dies.

No nursing mother ever dies.

So there you have it. Add it all up and it is obvious that women’s bodies are perfectly designed to give birth. Natural childbirth and homebirth advocates know this; how can those foolish obstetricians think otherwise?

Dear attachment parents,

I’m beginning to wonder if you love your children as much as I love mine.

Why? Lots of reasons:

As I wrote last week, natural childbirth advocates seem to have a very difficult time bonding to their own babies. That’s the message that I take away from your endless whining about how epidurals, C-sections and bottlefeeding undermine the mother-infant bond. Why do you have so much trouble doing what every other woman does naturally?

I also wrote that I don’t understand why lactivists, who insist that letting a baby cry it out (CIO) causes brain damage if you are trying to convince that baby to go to sleep, appear to have no problems letting a hungry breastfed baby CIO rather than supplement with formula.

But there are other reasons, too. For example, why do natural childbirth advocates insist that a healthy baby “isn’t enough”? It was more than enough for me and for most women who really love our babies. Don’t you love your babies that much, too?

And why do you joke about the “dead baby card”? Is it really a joke if your baby dies during childbirth?

Who in the world cares so little about their babies that they take immunology advice from Jenny McCarthy instead of from a pediatrician, immunologist or public health official? I love my children enough to be sure I get medical advice from medical professionals. Why don’t you care about your babies enough to do the same?

My four children are grown up now, but I love them enough that I would have given my right arm to spare them serious pain or illness, and my very life to save theirs. I still would. It’s not something I planned or sought. It just happened naturally when they were born. So it truly baffles me that you apparently don’t feel the same.

Don’t bother telling me that my words makes you angry. That’s what happens when you feel guilty and defensive about the fact that I am a better mother than you, and you know it.

Wait, what? I’m making you feel guilty? Puh-leese!! No one can make you feel guilty unless you truly are guilty.

I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I’m just stating the obvious. You clearly don’t love your children as much as I love mine, and if that makes you feel bad, you have only yourself to blame.

*****

Have I gotten your attention, attachment parents? Is your blood boiling at my insinuations?

It ought to be, because those insinuations are deliberately nasty, vicious, and meant to wound in the worst possible way. So why did I write it?

Simple. I wanted to show you what the bilge you spew in your blogs, websites and message boards feels like to those you target. It doesn’t feel good to be targeted in this (highly effective) way, does it? So why are you doing it to everyone who doesn’t mirror your own choices back to you.

Why do natural childbirth advocates insinuate or state that women who choose pain relief in labor are “drugging” their babies?

Why do lactivists imply or state that women who don’t breastfeed are lazy and selfish?

Why do attachment parents muse that the peace would reign across the land if only everyone else were an attachment parent, too?

And, why, in the ultimate irony, do the uneducated fools who are vaccine rejectionists insist that denying their children life saving vaccines is an educated and loving choice, when it is the exact opposite?

Why? Because they want to wound other mothers in the worst possible way. And, much to their glee and self-satisfaction, it works just as intended.

*****

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here. Perhaps you didn’t know. Or maybe you didn’t truly understand what it feels like to have your love for your children questioned. If so, you can always apologize.

Remove the snarky illustrations and language from your websites. Stop insinuating on message boards that everyone who doesn’t mirror your own choices is lazy and selfish. Stop accusing women who tell you that they were wounded by the memes you posted on Facebook that they feel bad because they feel guilty.

Are you capable of that? Are you able to acknowledge that women who make different choices love their children just as fiercely as you love yours?

I have my doubts. Prove me wrong.

All of us familiar with the idea of falling in love with an illusion, an idealization of a person instead of the person as he or she really exists.  As psychiatrist Neel Burton writes:

Idealization involves overestimating the positive attributes of a person, object, or idea and underestimating the negative attributes; but more fundamentally, it involves the projection of our needs, desires, and fantasies onto that person, object, or idea. The classic example of idealization is that of being infatuated, when love is confounded with the need to love …

In contrast to the illusion of love, real love involves loving the person, object or idea for who or what they really are. In other words, mature love requires respect.

Natural childbirth advocates have fallen in love with an illusion of Nature. That illusory love of Nature is fundamentally disrespectful, because all negative characteristics are ignored. Natural childbirth advocates don’t love Nature. They love the illusion of Nature that they have created to meet their own needs.

Natural childbirth advocates like to say that Nature designed women to give birth. Nature doesn’t design anything and Nature does not create perfection. Traits and abilities are subject to natural selection mediated through the survival of the fittest. An organism perfectly adapted to one environment may turn out to be an utter failure when the environment changes as it inevitably does.

Nature is imagined as benign by natural childbirth advocates, but “nature is red in tooth and claw.” Death, violent and agonizing is a fundamental, ineradicable feature of the life all animals, and human beings are no exception. Claiming that natural childbirth is safe because we wouldn’t be here makes about as much sense as claiming that humans never kills each other because if they did we wouldn’t be here. Death in childbirth is as common as death in war and we’re all still here.

Natural childbirth advocates are hubristic. They imagine that because they love Nature, Nature is obligated to love them back. They imagine that because they worship Nature, Nature won’t visit calamities on them. They prefer to ignore the fact that Nature is responsible for earthquakes, typhoons, snake bite and disease. They imagine Nature as a gentle breeze when it is in reality a heartless, selfish force, operating to the rhythm of its own rules and completely unconcerned with the wishes and hopes of human beings. Trusting birth not to kill your baby makes about as much sense as trusting a typhoon not to kill your baby. Pretending that your affirmations have the ability to affect the outcome of childbirth is like pretending that your affirmations have the ability to stop an earthquake in progress.

Obstetricians, in contrast, have profound respect for Nature and her power. Because they have orders of magnitude more experience of childbirth than anyone else, they are intimately familiar with the death dealing ways of Nature. It is Nature that creates miscarriage, stillbirth, pre-eclampsia, Rh disease, massive maternal hemorrhage and hypoxic brain damage. The incidence of most potentially fatal childbirth complications has changed little over the years. The only thing that has changed is our ability to treat and sometimes prevent these otherwise fatal complications.

Natural childbirth advocates like to whine that obstetricians “play the dead baby card.” Damn straight, because without obstetricians 7% of babies and 1% of mothers will die in and around childbirth … and that doesn’t even count the 20% of established pregnancies that will end in miscarriage in the first trimester. Obstetricians aren’t foolish enough to pretend that complications are rare or that they can be wished away by affirmation. Obstetricians, unlike smug natural childbirth advocates, know that Nature is far more powerful than they are.

Trusting birth is like trusting a tiger. Both are wild, unpredictable and uncontrollable. People who work with wild animals show their respect for them, their power and their ability to deal death by taking preventive measures. Obstetricians know that childbirth is wild, unpredictable and uncontrollable. They show their respect for childbirth, for its power and its ability to deal death by taking preventive measures. We would judge anyone who chose to enter a tiger cage without protection as foolish beyond measure. Anyone who chooses to give birth without protection is just as foolish.

Mature love requires respecting the object of that love for who or what it is. The worship of Nature among natural childbirth is not mature love, because it lacks fundamental respect for the reality of childbirth, and of Nature itself. Natural childbirth advocates have fallen in love with an illusion. Unfortunately, the consequences can be far worse than a broken heart.

You cannot make this stuff up.

From Mothering.com:

I am having such a difficult time deciding between lotus birth and cubing the placenta for consumption in smoothies. I am trying to find a solution that will be less stressful on both DD and myself. Has anyone waited until the umbilical naturally shriveled closed to sever it?

This is a tough question. On the one hand we have the made up nonsensical claim that lotus birth, leaving the placenta attached to the newborn baby until it rots off several days later, is good for the baby. On the other hand, we have the made up nonsensical claim that eating placenta prevents postpartum depression. What’s a New-Age know-nothing to do?

According to one of the respondents, you can have your placenta and eat it, too.

I waited about 36 hours after my 2nd’s birth, and by that time the cord was dry, hard and quite thin. It was hard to cut, like a thick fingernail. I didn’t feel comfortable eating the placenta so I just stuck it in the freezer. Gloria Lemay has a blog post suggesting you could keep the placenta in a cooler bag with an ice pack while it is attached if you want the best of both worlds.

See, that wasn’t so hard. This is why Mothering.com is the go to guide for sharing mind blowing ignorance and stupidity among homebirth advocates.

The contempt that lactivists evince for women who don’t mirror their own choices back to them beggars belief.

The latest example: an odious attempt to bribe women into breastfeeding.

According to the BBC:

Under the scheme mothers from specific parts of Sheffield and Chesterfield will be offered the vouchers, which they can then use in supermarkets and high street shops…

To qualify for the full £200 of rewards, the women will have to breastfeed until six months.

However, it will be frontloaded – enabling those taking part to get £120 for breastfeeding for the first six weeks.

Midwives and health visitors will be asked to verify whether the women are breastfeeding.

The team behind the project said breastfeeding was a cause of health inequalities, pointing to research that showed it helped prevent health problems such as upset stomachs and chest infections as well as leading to better educational attainment.

Dr Clare Relton, the Sheffield University expert leading the project, said she hoped the financial incentives would create a culture where breastfeeding was seen as the norm.

Bullshit!

Breastfeeding is a cause of health inequalities? An increase in colds and upset stomachs qualifies as a health inequality?

Do lactivists believe the crap that they spout?

There is NO EVIDENCE, zero, zip, nada, that breastfeeding is a cause of health inequities. There is no remotely plausible reason to believe such nonsense. Breastfeeding has real benefits, but for term babies those benefits are so trivial as to be limited to a population wide minor decrease in infant colds and diarrheal illnesses.

Furthermore, we KNOW that breastfeeding tracks with the real causes of health inequities: race, socioeconomic status, and education levels. When those confounding variables are removed, breastfeeding term babies doesn’t seem to have much benefit at all.

Bribing women will create a culture where breastfeeding will be seen as the norm?

Earth to lactivists: if you have to bribe someone to do it, you are sending the exact OPPOSITE message. You are sending the message that it is difficult, expensive and distasteful. Otherwise you wouldn’t be offering bribes.

Most importantly, there is NO EVIDENCE that either carrots or sticks works to get women to breastfeed. To my knowledge, not a single program specifically designed to increase breasting rates has actually worked. Bribing women with food didn’t work. Banning gifts of formula samples won’t work, and neither will locking up formula in hospitals.

So if bribing women to breastfeed won’t increase breastfeeding rates, why are lactivists promoting it? It’s because it is yet another way for them to demonstrate their contempt for women who bottle feed. Apparently lactivists believe that these economically deprived women are so stupid and so uncaring that they can’t be motivated by “educating” them on the benefits of breastfeeding. Lactivists assume that poor women love money more than they love their babies and therefore money will do the trick.

What is particularly execrable is that lactivists figure that these women are so poor and so venal that they can be bribed with trivial amounts of money. Offering £ 200 for 6 months of breastfeeding works out to slightly more than a pound per day. That’s a bit more than $1.50 per day. Is that really an incentive? It’s less than the cost of formula per day. If the money were really an incentive, those women would be breastfeeding already.

It’s particularly infuriating that lactivists refuse to use the money to address the real reasons for low breastfeeding rates. Breastfeeding is difficult, painful and often inconvenient. But acknowledging the reality of breastfeeding, and helping women to cope with real breastfeeding difficulties would involve admitting the truth about breastfeeding. Lactivists would rather pretend that women who don’t breastfeed are stupid and capable of being bribed with trivial amounts of money than to admit that breastfeeding is anything other than perfect bliss.

So a £ 200 bribe is going to be wasted in a doomed attempt to increase breastfeeding rates. What’s even more galling is how many ways it the money could be better spent to improve the health of infant. How about spending the money to improve the quality of British maternity care overall? According to SkyNews:

Between April and September 2012, more than a quarter (28%) of maternity units were forced to close their doors to patients for at least half a day because of a lack of space or a shortage of midwives.

Of these units, 11% closed for the equivalent of a fortnight or more, the report found.

The result?

A fifth of maternity services funding is spent on insurance against malpractice, according to a review by the National Audit Office (NAO).

The report found the NHS in England spent £482m on clinical negligence cover in the last year – the equivalent of £700 per birth.

The most common reasons for maternity claims are mistakes during labour or caesarean sections and errors resulting in cerebral palsy, the review said.

Public Accounts Committee chairwoman Margaret Hodge said the figures were “absolutely scandalous”.

“The current system is not working as it should,” she said.

“The Department of Health needs to buck up and take responsibility for this.

“It needs to review its monitoring and reporting process to ensure that all relevant bodies can work effectively together to deliver maternity services that are value for money and fit for purpose.”

The British maternity system is in critical condition and babies are suffering and dying as a result. Diverting money from maternity care to bribe women to breastfeed isn’t just loathsome, it’s downright immoral.

Natural parenting advocates are certain that natural parenting is the best way to raise children despite the complete absence of proof for any of its central claims.

They believe that unmedicated vaginal birth is safer and healthier although there is no evidence to support that claim.

They believe that breastfeeding of term infants confers massive, lifelong benefits despite data that is weak, conflicting and riddled with confounding variables.

They believe that baby wearing improves the mother-infant bond although that premise has never been tested, let alone found to be true.

They believe that vaccines are harmful, cause autism and that a multiplicity of vaccines “overwhelm” the immune system despite masses of data proving the exact opposite.

Why do they hold such strong beliefs in the absence of scientific proof? It’s simple; they are impressed with the “truthiness” of natural parenting.

The comedian Steven Colbert coined the term “truthiness.” According to Wikipedia:

Truthiness is a quality characterizing a “truth” that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively “from the gut” or because it “feels right” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

In an out of character interview Colbert explained:

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the President [George W. Bush] because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?…

Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ …

Colbert was talking about politics, but it applies equally to natural parenting. Indeed, the appeal to truthiness is quite explicit in natural parenting. The natural childbirth advocacy advice to trust your “instincts,” is a call to value truthiness above truth. It doesn’t matter what obstetricians say about the dangers of postdates, breech vaginal birth, homebirth, etc; the only thing that matters what you believe the dangers to be.

Why are so many professional natural childbirth advocates either sociologists or anthropologists? Because they, too, value truthiness above truth.

Many dismiss science as a male form of “authoritative knowledge” on the understanding that there are “other ways of knowing” like “intuition.” Many are post modernists who believe that reality is radically subjective, that rationality is unnecessary and that “including the non-rational is sensible midwifery.”

Perhaps nowhere is truthiness more valued than among the vaccine rejectionists. They, too, are quite explicit in their rejection of truth for intuition. Vaccines cause autism because some parents feel that vaccines caused their children’s autism. Never mind that copious scientific evidence has shown that there is no causal connection between vaccines and autism. They embrace modified vaccination schedules because some parents feel that multiple vaccines given together or even separately over time “overwhelm” a child’s immune system. Never mind that anyone with a modicum of knowledge of immunology recognizes this claim as nonsense.

Colbert, in explaining the genesis of truthiness, observed:

We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist.

The central claims of natural childbirth, lactivism, attachment parenting and vaccine rejection aren’t the truth; they’re the truth that natural parenting advocates want to exist. Those claims may be appealing because they’re truthy, but the reality is that they are not true.

Most attachment parenting advocates are strongly opposed to the sleep training method known as “cry it out,” abbreviated CIO.

According to Darcia Narvaez, PhD:

With neuroscience, we can confirm what our ancestors took for granted—that letting babies get distressed is a practice that can damage children and their relational capacities in many ways for the long term. We know now that leaving babies to cry is a good way to make a less intelligent, less healthy but more anxious, uncooperative and alienated person who can pass the same or worse traits on to the next generation.

That’s nothing but nonsense, of course, on a variety of levels. It’s nonsense because crying it out does not cause brain damage and it’s nonsense because it is based on the myth of our “noble savage” ancestors who had nothing better to do with their time than endlessly soothe their multiple babies.

But let’s take CIO opponents at their word for the moment. If they honestly believe that CIO harms babies, why do they think it is okay for hungry breastfed babies to cry it out?

Hunger is probably the most elemental of infant drives and, as anyone who has seen an infant scream from hunger would probably agree, is experienced by the baby as suffering. For most mothers, myself included, the sound of their own infant crying is piercing in its intensity and distress. I remember being surprised by this when my first child was born. I had spent my entire professional life surrounded by crying babies and it had never bothered me, yet I found my son’s crying unbearable and always rushed to determine what was wrong and fix it in any way possible. I cannot imagine letting any of my infants cry in out in hunger for any length of time without feeding them.

So why do lactivists think it okay to let babies cry it out for hours at a time because of desperate, all consuming hunger?

Why do they advise women whose babies aren’t getting enough milk in the first few days CIO arguing that assuaging an infant’s hunger now, when he is suffering, will undermine breastfeeding? Why do they view supplementation in the first view days as an evil so great that it is preferable to force babies to CIO and thereby destroy their brain cells?

Why do lactivists think it is okay to ignore an infant who is not gaining weight because of a maternal milk supply that does not match that infants needs? Why do they denigrate women who find their baby soothed and content after a bottle of formula, and chastise them that they should have let the baby CIO?

Why do lactivists who have children who try to wean before their mothers have planned to stop breastfeeding counsel each other to starve the baby into submission? Why do they tell each other to offer no other source of nourishment and let the baby cry it out until forced to give up his or her drive for independence and bow to the mother’s will to continue breastfeeding in order to survive?

Why do lactivists consider maternal mental health/postpartum depression to be a trivial reason for letting babies CIO, but consider that establishing or preserving a breastfeeding relationship is a perfectly acceptable reason for CIO?

Feel free to correct me, but I’m not aware of a single lactivist or attachment parenting blogger who sees anything wrong with letting a hungry breastfed baby cry it out.

Why the hypocrisy?

Because lactivism and attachment parenting have little if anything to do with babies and their wellbeing and everything to do with parents and their self-image. A “good mother” supposedly sacrifices her sleep and mental health and is willing to spend every minute of every day soothing an infant in order to avoid crying it out. But a “good mother” also breastfeeds and therefore, any amount of CIO is acceptable to preserve bragging rights to exclusive breastfeeding.

I’ve always loved this quote from Maureen Hawkins:

Before you were conceived, I wanted you. Before you were born, I loved you. Before you were an hour, I would die for you. This is the miracle of love.

It beautifully describes how fiercely I bonded to each of my four children, even before they were born.

I had no control over it. It happened without my doing a single thing. So I feel somewhat sorry for natural childbirth advocates who apparently have so much trouble bonding to their own babies and getting their babies to bond to them.

The quote above does not mention vaginal delivery, yet natural childbirth advocates, unlike most women in the world, appear to have trouble bonding with babies who haven’t transited their vagina.

The quote doesn’t mention pain or pain relief in labor, yet natural childbirth advocates, unlike most women in the world, appear to have trouble bonding with babies if they received pain relief in labor, especially if they had planned to refuse it.

The quote does not mention feeding method, yet natural childbirth advocates appear to have trouble bonding to babies unless they breastfeed them, and apparently, it takes them extra long to bond with their own babies since they insist that they must breastfeed them for extended lengths of time to strengthen the tenuous bond.

Indeed, their ability to bond with their own babies is so fragile that unless they immediately hold their babies skin to skin, they have trouble completing that natural bond.

That’s not to say that every woman bonds to every baby immediately. It can take days or weeks or more, but nearly every woman manages to bond fiercely to her child and nearly every child bonds to his or her mother.

So natural childbirth advocates apparently have great difficulty bonding to their own babies. That’s the message that I take away from their endless bleating about how epidurals, C-sections and bottlefeeding undermine the mother-infant bond. Why do they have so much trouble doing what every other woman does naturally? What accounts for the irony that the women most committed to “natural” birth can’t manage natural bonding when faced with even the least little disappointment or difficultly?

I would guess that it has to do with viewing the baby as merely a prop in their little pieces of performance art. Like bridezillas who become enraged by a wedding cake that is the wrong flavor and think the wedding is ruined, natural childbirth advocates appear to become distraught at not having an unmedicated vaginal delivery and bear resentment of the baby for “ruining” their experience. Natural childbirth advocates, and lactivists, too, see babies as bit players in the narrative of their mothering superiority (hence the endless blather that producing breastmilk is a superpower or that vaginas have superpowers). Simply put, natural childbirth advocates seems to have trouble appreciating, bonding to, and loving their babies for who they are, instead of what they can do for them.

Perhaps natural childbirth advocates can explain it to the rest of us: For most women, NOTHING can interfere with the fierce bond that they form to their babies. Why do NCB advocates and lactivists form only fragile bonds that can be destroyed by a C-section or a bottle of formula?

If there’s a bigger oxymoron than the “Baby Friendly” Hospital Initiative, I’m not aware of it. There is nothing baby friendly about efforts to promote breastfeeding to the exclusion of a mother and baby’s actual needs. There is not, and there can never be, anything “baby friendly” about destroying the confidence of new mothers and making them feel guilty about a decision with trivial consequences.

It’s time (actually long past time) for a MOTHER friendly breastfeeding initiative.

What would a mother friendly breastfeeding initiative entail? It would start with some basic truths about breastfeeding and mothering:

1. While breastfeeding has real benefits, those benefits are so small as to be trivial in all cases except premature babies. Understanding and acknowledging this scientific reality is the first step to a safe, sane, respectful breastfeeding policy.

2. The obvious corollary to #1 is this: once a woman has been given accurate information about the benefits of breastfeeding, it DOES NOT MATTER what choice she makes, and therefore hospitals should NOT be devoting copious resources to it. Those resources would be much better spent teaching basic parenting to low income, young women or on programs to prevent prematurity.

3. Formula is an EXCELLENT source of nutrition for babies. There is absolutely positively nothing wrong with it, and no mother should be made to feel guilty for feeding to her child, regardless of the reason for choosing it.

4. Breasts are part of a woman’s body. NO ONE has the right to tell women how they must or should use their breasts. PERIOD.

5. I don’t know of a single endeavor where humiliation produces results. It’s time for lactivists and lactation consultants to acknowledge that and stop the hectoring treatment being offered in hospitals.

6. In my judgment, boosting fragile maternal confidence is an important task of anyone who cares for women and babies. Setting arbitrary standards, ignoring women’s own needs, pretending that every woman can breastfeed successfully are sure-fire ways to undermine self-confidence, not build it.

7. Stop treating new mothers like morons. EVERY women knows that “breast is best.” If a woman decides to formula feed, it does NOT mean that she doesn’t understand the benefits of breastfeeding.

8. Breastmilk does not have magical properties. Its ability to prevent vaccine preventable illnesses is small and easily outstripped by vaccination itself. It does not increase intelligence; it does not prevent obesity; and it does not confer health on its recipients.

9. No one has ever demonstrate ANY benefit to donor breastmilk for term babies.

10. The risks of potentially contaminated donor breastmilk from unregulated arrangements far outstrips any putative benefits.

Why is it critically important to make our breastfeeding initiatives MOTHER friendly?

We have made great strides in understanding the devastating impact of postpartum depression, yet we seem to ignore those insights when trying to promote breastfeeding. Adequate sleep, lots of help and feelings of competence can help prevent and treat postpartum depression. Why then do we pretend that breastfeeding is more important than these factors so critical for women’s mental health?

Contemporary efforts at breastfeeding promotion remind me of the efforts to encourage right handedness among the left handed in generations past. The humiliation and physical abuse associated with forcing right handedness were justified by claims that being right handed is “better” and “easier.” The humiliation and guilt inducing behavior of lactivists and their breastfeeding initiatives are justified by claims that breastfeeding is “better” and “easier.” Humiliation and physical abuse were believed to be “effective” in forcing right handedness when the reality was that it was effective only in inducing despair. Lactivists apparently believe that humiliation and guilt are effective in increasing breastfeeding rates when the reality is that they are effective only in getting women to lie about their intentions or to despair when they can’t realize those intentions.

There is NOTHING wrong with formula feeding, the benefits of breastfeeding are trivial and the harms to women and babies of venerating breastmilk as magical far outstrip any of those putative benefits. It’s time to get real about breastfeeding and to stop the nonsense of “baby friendly” hospital initiatives. Such initiatives are friendly to only one group: lactivists, who are building their own self-esteem by tearing other women down. If we actually care about mothers and babies, we would remove “baby friendly” programs and replace them with accurate scientific information, respect for women’s intelligence and efforts to support mothers regardless of feeding choice.

It’s time for safe, sane and respectful breastfeeding policies. It is time for MOTHER friendly breastfeeding initiatives.

Love this!

Quacktivists beware; he’s talking about you!