Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
Everything about having children is voluntary, but still a public good. So you’re equally in favor of doing away with protections in the workplace for pregnant women? You’re not in support of paid parental leave? Or is it just that, as someone who dislikes women who breastfeed, you would like their lives to be a little bit worse?
No, because pregnancy, post-partum, and breastfeeding in the first year (to a lesser extent) are physical burdens on the woman’s body that need to be accomodated in the workplace. After a year, any continuing physical burden of breastfeeding is entirely the optional choice of the woman.
All of it is optional. Every part of the “physical burden” is optional. Trying to draw an arbitrary line at when you feel it’s “more” optional is silly.
We obviously draw lines, and accomodation for pregnancy and post-partum makes sense because objectively, most women have children (and now in many states they do not have a choice about that). If women are going to be in the workforce, they need that physical accomodation. But breastfeeding after 1 is not similarly a physical necessity related to childbearing. It falls onto the optional side - so optional that very few women do it. The need for accommodations is much lower, and the lack of accomodations does not prevent women from having children while in the workplace.
The same argument can be made about breastfeeding before one. Formula is available in every grocery store, so there’s no reason to allow lactation breaks at all by your logic. Then women can be even more productive in the workplace which obviously should be their all consuming goal.
Well I’m not a big proponent of breastfeeding protections at work for that reason. I would much rather have had that political capital spent on more leave time (even unpaid FMLA). the “protection” of allowing unpaid breaks to pump milk at work is really just yet another way the public health world has chosen to target women’s unpaid labor as a way to achieve their policy goals. because hey, it costs nobody and women are easy targets to persuade!
Why are you pretending there is a tension between the two? We could have longer leave time *and* workplace protection for nursing. Why create false scarcity if not to foment additional conflict between women?
Why pretend these protections don't have costs to your employer and/or your coworkers. I've been in a woman-led organization in a country with 12 month paid maternity leave (for mothers, not fathers). I saw how having a fifth of the staff go on maternity leave (one of them twice) in three years affected the organization and the female director's perspective on hiring women of childbearing age. I myself had to do uncompensated work because one of them came back part time so I had to do her job on the days she was not there (I left that job). Acting like you can just mandate everything and demand that employers bear the costs is dumb and harmful to women.
What does your rant about 12 months of maternity leave have to do with breastfeeding?
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
Everything about having children is voluntary, but still a public good. So you’re equally in favor of doing away with protections in the workplace for pregnant women? You’re not in support of paid parental leave? Or is it just that, as someone who dislikes women who breastfeed, you would like their lives to be a little bit worse?
No, because pregnancy, post-partum, and breastfeeding in the first year (to a lesser extent) are physical burdens on the woman’s body that need to be accomodated in the workplace. After a year, any continuing physical burden of breastfeeding is entirely the optional choice of the woman.
All of it is optional. Every part of the “physical burden” is optional. Trying to draw an arbitrary line at when you feel it’s “more” optional is silly.
We obviously draw lines, and accomodation for pregnancy and post-partum makes sense because objectively, most women have children (and now in many states they do not have a choice about that). If women are going to be in the workforce, they need that physical accomodation. But breastfeeding after 1 is not similarly a physical necessity related to childbearing. It falls onto the optional side - so optional that very few women do it. The need for accommodations is much lower, and the lack of accomodations does not prevent women from having children while in the workplace.
The same argument can be made about breastfeeding before one. Formula is available in every grocery store, so there’s no reason to allow lactation breaks at all by your logic. Then women can be even more productive in the workplace which obviously should be their all consuming goal.
Well I’m not a big proponent of breastfeeding protections at work for that reason. I would much rather have had that political capital spent on more leave time (even unpaid FMLA). the “protection” of allowing unpaid breaks to pump milk at work is really just yet another way the public health world has chosen to target women’s unpaid labor as a way to achieve their policy goals. because hey, it costs nobody and women are easy targets to persuade!
Why are you pretending there is a tension between the two? We could have longer leave time *and* workplace protection for nursing. Why create false scarcity if not to foment additional conflict between women?
Why pretend these protections don't have costs to your employer and/or your coworkers. I've been in a woman-led organization in a country with 12 month paid maternity leave (for mothers, not fathers). I saw how having a fifth of the staff go on maternity leave (one of them twice) in three years affected the organization and the female director's perspective on hiring women of childbearing age. I myself had to do uncompensated work because one of them came back part time so I had to do her job on the days she was not there (I left that job). Acting like you can just mandate everything and demand that employers bear the costs is dumb and harmful to women.
What does your rant about 12 months of maternity leave have to do with breastfeeding?
Why can't you follow a conversation? You lactivism really can't handle any kind of discussion about anything, can you? Everything has to be about you.
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
Everything about having children is voluntary, but still a public good. So you’re equally in favor of doing away with protections in the workplace for pregnant women? You’re not in support of paid parental leave? Or is it just that, as someone who dislikes women who breastfeed, you would like their lives to be a little bit worse?
No, because pregnancy, post-partum, and breastfeeding in the first year (to a lesser extent) are physical burdens on the woman’s body that need to be accomodated in the workplace. After a year, any continuing physical burden of breastfeeding is entirely the optional choice of the woman.
All of it is optional. Every part of the “physical burden” is optional. Trying to draw an arbitrary line at when you feel it’s “more” optional is silly.
We obviously draw lines, and accomodation for pregnancy and post-partum makes sense because objectively, most women have children (and now in many states they do not have a choice about that). If women are going to be in the workforce, they need that physical accomodation. But breastfeeding after 1 is not similarly a physical necessity related to childbearing. It falls onto the optional side - so optional that very few women do it. The need for accommodations is much lower, and the lack of accomodations does not prevent women from having children while in the workplace.
The same argument can be made about breastfeeding before one. Formula is available in every grocery store, so there’s no reason to allow lactation breaks at all by your logic. Then women can be even more productive in the workplace which obviously should be their all consuming goal.
Well I’m not a big proponent of breastfeeding protections at work for that reason. I would much rather have had that political capital spent on more leave time (even unpaid FMLA). the “protection” of allowing unpaid breaks to pump milk at work is really just yet another way the public health world has chosen to target women’s unpaid labor as a way to achieve their policy goals. because hey, it costs nobody and women are easy targets to persuade!
Why are you pretending there is a tension between the two? We could have longer leave time *and* workplace protection for nursing. Why create false scarcity if not to foment additional conflict between women?
Why pretend these protections don't have costs to your employer and/or your coworkers. I've been in a woman-led organization in a country with 12 month paid maternity leave (for mothers, not fathers). I saw how having a fifth of the staff go on maternity leave (one of them twice) in three years affected the organization and the female director's perspective on hiring women of childbearing age. I myself had to do uncompensated work because one of them came back part time so I had to do her job on the days she was not there (I left that job). Acting like you can just mandate everything and demand that employers bear the costs is dumb and harmful to women.
Your organization was badly run. Would you like a sticker?
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
Everything about having children is voluntary, but still a public good. So you’re equally in favor of doing away with protections in the workplace for pregnant women? You’re not in support of paid parental leave? Or is it just that, as someone who dislikes women who breastfeed, you would like their lives to be a little bit worse?
No, because pregnancy, post-partum, and breastfeeding in the first year (to a lesser extent) are physical burdens on the woman’s body that need to be accomodated in the workplace. After a year, any continuing physical burden of breastfeeding is entirely the optional choice of the woman.
All of it is optional. Every part of the “physical burden” is optional. Trying to draw an arbitrary line at when you feel it’s “more” optional is silly.
We obviously draw lines, and accomodation for pregnancy and post-partum makes sense because objectively, most women have children (and now in many states they do not have a choice about that). If women are going to be in the workforce, they need that physical accomodation. But breastfeeding after 1 is not similarly a physical necessity related to childbearing. It falls onto the optional side - so optional that very few women do it. The need for accommodations is much lower, and the lack of accomodations does not prevent women from having children while in the workplace.
The same argument can be made about breastfeeding before one. Formula is available in every grocery store, so there’s no reason to allow lactation breaks at all by your logic. Then women can be even more productive in the workplace which obviously should be their all consuming goal.
Well I’m not a big proponent of breastfeeding protections at work for that reason. I would much rather have had that political capital spent on more leave time (even unpaid FMLA). the “protection” of allowing unpaid breaks to pump milk at work is really just yet another way the public health world has chosen to target women’s unpaid labor as a way to achieve their policy goals. because hey, it costs nobody and women are easy targets to persuade!
Why are you pretending there is a tension between the two? We could have longer leave time *and* workplace protection for nursing. Why create false scarcity if not to foment additional conflict between women?
Why pretend these protections don't have costs to your employer and/or your coworkers. I've been in a woman-led organization in a country with 12 month paid maternity leave (for mothers, not fathers). I saw how having a fifth of the staff go on maternity leave (one of them twice) in three years affected the organization and the female director's perspective on hiring women of childbearing age. I myself had to do uncompensated work because one of them came back part time so I had to do her job on the days she was not there (I left that job). Acting like you can just mandate everything and demand that employers bear the costs is dumb and harmful to women.
Lots of things have costs for employers. Have you ever considered how expensive health benefits are? Paid vacation? Sabbaticals? Subsidized parking? Rent for offices?
Organizations have money for the things that matter and the things that attract high performing employees. Public policies that protect those rights are what will keep them from being only available to women at a certain socioeconomic level, and also available to people who work hourly.
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
Everything about having children is voluntary, but still a public good. So you’re equally in favor of doing away with protections in the workplace for pregnant women? You’re not in support of paid parental leave? Or is it just that, as someone who dislikes women who breastfeed, you would like their lives to be a little bit worse?
No, because pregnancy, post-partum, and breastfeeding in the first year (to a lesser extent) are physical burdens on the woman’s body that need to be accomodated in the workplace. After a year, any continuing physical burden of breastfeeding is entirely the optional choice of the woman.
All of it is optional. Every part of the “physical burden” is optional. Trying to draw an arbitrary line at when you feel it’s “more” optional is silly.
We obviously draw lines, and accomodation for pregnancy and post-partum makes sense because objectively, most women have children (and now in many states they do not have a choice about that). If women are going to be in the workforce, they need that physical accomodation. But breastfeeding after 1 is not similarly a physical necessity related to childbearing. It falls onto the optional side - so optional that very few women do it. The need for accommodations is much lower, and the lack of accomodations does not prevent women from having children while in the workplace.
The same argument can be made about breastfeeding before one. Formula is available in every grocery store, so there’s no reason to allow lactation breaks at all by your logic. Then women can be even more productive in the workplace which obviously should be their all consuming goal.
Well I’m not a big proponent of breastfeeding protections at work for that reason. I would much rather have had that political capital spent on more leave time (even unpaid FMLA). the “protection” of allowing unpaid breaks to pump milk at work is really just yet another way the public health world has chosen to target women’s unpaid labor as a way to achieve their policy goals. because hey, it costs nobody and women are easy targets to persuade!
Why are you pretending there is a tension between the two? We could have longer leave time *and* workplace protection for nursing. Why create false scarcity if not to foment additional conflict between women?
Why pretend these protections don't have costs to your employer and/or your coworkers. I've been in a woman-led organization in a country with 12 month paid maternity leave (for mothers, not fathers). I saw how having a fifth of the staff go on maternity leave (one of them twice) in three years affected the organization and the female director's perspective on hiring women of childbearing age. I myself had to do uncompensated work because one of them came back part time so I had to do her job on the days she was not there (I left that job). Acting like you can just mandate everything and demand that employers bear the costs is dumb and harmful to women.
Lots of things have costs for employers. Have you ever considered how expensive health benefits are? Paid vacation? Sabbaticals? Subsidized parking? Rent for offices?
Organizations have money for the things that matter and the things that attract high performing employees. Public policies that protect those rights are what will keep them from being only available to women at a certain socioeconomic level, and also available to people who work hourly.
I think you missed the point about how when a cost applies to women only, they get discriminated against. Again, paid parental leave advocates know this well and are strategic about what they advocate for as a result.
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
Everything about having children is voluntary, but still a public good. So you’re equally in favor of doing away with protections in the workplace for pregnant women? You’re not in support of paid parental leave? Or is it just that, as someone who dislikes women who breastfeed, you would like their lives to be a little bit worse?
No, because pregnancy, post-partum, and breastfeeding in the first year (to a lesser extent) are physical burdens on the woman’s body that need to be accomodated in the workplace. After a year, any continuing physical burden of breastfeeding is entirely the optional choice of the woman.
All of it is optional. Every part of the “physical burden” is optional. Trying to draw an arbitrary line at when you feel it’s “more” optional is silly.
We obviously draw lines, and accomodation for pregnancy and post-partum makes sense because objectively, most women have children (and now in many states they do not have a choice about that). If women are going to be in the workforce, they need that physical accomodation. But breastfeeding after 1 is not similarly a physical necessity related to childbearing. It falls onto the optional side - so optional that very few women do it. The need for accommodations is much lower, and the lack of accomodations does not prevent women from having children while in the workplace.
The same argument can be made about breastfeeding before one. Formula is available in every grocery store, so there’s no reason to allow lactation breaks at all by your logic. Then women can be even more productive in the workplace which obviously should be their all consuming goal.
Well I’m not a big proponent of breastfeeding protections at work for that reason. I would much rather have had that political capital spent on more leave time (even unpaid FMLA). the “protection” of allowing unpaid breaks to pump milk at work is really just yet another way the public health world has chosen to target women’s unpaid labor as a way to achieve their policy goals. because hey, it costs nobody and women are easy targets to persuade!
Why are you pretending there is a tension between the two? We could have longer leave time *and* workplace protection for nursing. Why create false scarcity if not to foment additional conflict between women?
Why pretend these protections don't have costs to your employer and/or your coworkers. I've been in a woman-led organization in a country with 12 month paid maternity leave (for mothers, not fathers). I saw how having a fifth of the staff go on maternity leave (one of them twice) in three years affected the organization and the female director's perspective on hiring women of childbearing age. I myself had to do uncompensated work because one of them came back part time so I had to do her job on the days she was not there (I left that job). Acting like you can just mandate everything and demand that employers bear the costs is dumb and harmful to women.
Your organization was badly run. Would you like a sticker?
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
Everything about having children is voluntary, but still a public good. So you’re equally in favor of doing away with protections in the workplace for pregnant women? You’re not in support of paid parental leave? Or is it just that, as someone who dislikes women who breastfeed, you would like their lives to be a little bit worse?
No, because pregnancy, post-partum, and breastfeeding in the first year (to a lesser extent) are physical burdens on the woman’s body that need to be accomodated in the workplace. After a year, any continuing physical burden of breastfeeding is entirely the optional choice of the woman.
All of it is optional. Every part of the “physical burden” is optional. Trying to draw an arbitrary line at when you feel it’s “more” optional is silly.
We obviously draw lines, and accomodation for pregnancy and post-partum makes sense because objectively, most women have children (and now in many states they do not have a choice about that). If women are going to be in the workforce, they need that physical accomodation. But breastfeeding after 1 is not similarly a physical necessity related to childbearing. It falls onto the optional side - so optional that very few women do it. The need for accommodations is much lower, and the lack of accomodations does not prevent women from having children while in the workplace.
The same argument can be made about breastfeeding before one. Formula is available in every grocery store, so there’s no reason to allow lactation breaks at all by your logic. Then women can be even more productive in the workplace which obviously should be their all consuming goal.
Well I’m not a big proponent of breastfeeding protections at work for that reason. I would much rather have had that political capital spent on more leave time (even unpaid FMLA). the “protection” of allowing unpaid breaks to pump milk at work is really just yet another way the public health world has chosen to target women’s unpaid labor as a way to achieve their policy goals. because hey, it costs nobody and women are easy targets to persuade!
Why are you pretending there is a tension between the two? We could have longer leave time *and* workplace protection for nursing. Why create false scarcity if not to foment additional conflict between women?
Why pretend these protections don't have costs to your employer and/or your coworkers. I've been in a woman-led organization in a country with 12 month paid maternity leave (for mothers, not fathers). I saw how having a fifth of the staff go on maternity leave (one of them twice) in three years affected the organization and the female director's perspective on hiring women of childbearing age. I myself had to do uncompensated work because one of them came back part time so I had to do her job on the days she was not there (I left that job). Acting like you can just mandate everything and demand that employers bear the costs is dumb and harmful to women.
Lots of things have costs for employers. Have you ever considered how expensive health benefits are? Paid vacation? Sabbaticals? Subsidized parking? Rent for offices?
Organizations have money for the things that matter and the things that attract high performing employees. Public policies that protect those rights are what will keep them from being only available to women at a certain socioeconomic level, and also available to people who work hourly.
I think you missed the point about how when a cost applies to women only, they get discriminated against. Again, paid parental leave advocates know this well and are strategic about what they advocate for as a result.
Until things become law. Incremental improvement within the existing system is one option. Legal changes are another. Again if there’s demonstrated unwillingness to hire women that can be attributed reliably with rigorous studies to *unpaid nursing breaks* please share that with us. Otherwise it’s just putting two things in tension that don’t have to be in order to try to get support for one at the expense of the other.
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
Everything about having children is voluntary, but still a public good. So you’re equally in favor of doing away with protections in the workplace for pregnant women? You’re not in support of paid parental leave? Or is it just that, as someone who dislikes women who breastfeed, you would like their lives to be a little bit worse?
No, because pregnancy, post-partum, and breastfeeding in the first year (to a lesser extent) are physical burdens on the woman’s body that need to be accomodated in the workplace. After a year, any continuing physical burden of breastfeeding is entirely the optional choice of the woman.
All of it is optional. Every part of the “physical burden” is optional. Trying to draw an arbitrary line at when you feel it’s “more” optional is silly.
We obviously draw lines, and accomodation for pregnancy and post-partum makes sense because objectively, most women have children (and now in many states they do not have a choice about that). If women are going to be in the workforce, they need that physical accomodation. But breastfeeding after 1 is not similarly a physical necessity related to childbearing. It falls onto the optional side - so optional that very few women do it. The need for accommodations is much lower, and the lack of accomodations does not prevent women from having children while in the workplace.
The same argument can be made about breastfeeding before one. Formula is available in every grocery store, so there’s no reason to allow lactation breaks at all by your logic. Then women can be even more productive in the workplace which obviously should be their all consuming goal.
Well I’m not a big proponent of breastfeeding protections at work for that reason. I would much rather have had that political capital spent on more leave time (even unpaid FMLA). the “protection” of allowing unpaid breaks to pump milk at work is really just yet another way the public health world has chosen to target women’s unpaid labor as a way to achieve their policy goals. because hey, it costs nobody and women are easy targets to persuade!
Why are you pretending there is a tension between the two? We could have longer leave time *and* workplace protection for nursing. Why create false scarcity if not to foment additional conflict between women?
Why pretend these protections don't have costs to your employer and/or your coworkers. I've been in a woman-led organization in a country with 12 month paid maternity leave (for mothers, not fathers). I saw how having a fifth of the staff go on maternity leave (one of them twice) in three years affected the organization and the female director's perspective on hiring women of childbearing age. I myself had to do uncompensated work because one of them came back part time so I had to do her job on the days she was not there (I left that job). Acting like you can just mandate everything and demand that employers bear the costs is dumb and harmful to women.
Lots of things have costs for employers. Have you ever considered how expensive health benefits are? Paid vacation? Sabbaticals? Subsidized parking? Rent for offices?
Organizations have money for the things that matter and the things that attract high performing employees. Public policies that protect those rights are what will keep them from being only available to women at a certain socioeconomic level, and also available to people who work hourly.
I think you missed the point about how when a cost applies to women only, they get discriminated against. Again, paid parental leave advocates know this well and are strategic about what they advocate for as a result.
Until things become law. Incremental improvement within the existing system is one option. Legal changes are another. Again if there’s demonstrated unwillingness to hire women that can be attributed reliably with rigorous studies to *unpaid nursing breaks* please share that with us. Otherwise it’s just putting two things in tension that don’t have to be in order to try to get support for one at the expense of the other.
Sounds like we're going to have to agree to disagree.
Btw below is what womenshealth.gov recommends to employers to meet their legal responsibilities to breastfeeding women. Tldr? It affects their business and for many, costs them money. And maybe that's okay? But I don't want to be the lucky woman that interviews for a position in an organization that recently had a woman that took 3 pumping breaks per day for 2 years.
"Providing coverage when employees are taking a pumping break can be handled in various ways:
Workers cover for one another as needed.
The supervisor or manager provides coverage when an employee needs to be away from her work station.
Designated floaters provide coverage when an employee is taking a break.
The employer adjusts the employee’s work schedule to accommodate flexible nursing breaks when needed.
Transportation employees are given a different route that can accommodate lactation breaks, or sales employees are given a different but equitable client list.
Some employees may need different duties temporarily. For example, a bulletproof vest worn by police officers may interfere with milk expression, and it may not be possible to find private lactation space while on duty.
Small businesses where the breastfeeding mother is the only employee present may need to post a “be right back” sign or phone message during pumping breaks."
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
Everything about having children is voluntary, but still a public good. So you’re equally in favor of doing away with protections in the workplace for pregnant women? You’re not in support of paid parental leave? Or is it just that, as someone who dislikes women who breastfeed, you would like their lives to be a little bit worse?
No, because pregnancy, post-partum, and breastfeeding in the first year (to a lesser extent) are physical burdens on the woman’s body that need to be accomodated in the workplace. After a year, any continuing physical burden of breastfeeding is entirely the optional choice of the woman.
All of it is optional. Every part of the “physical burden” is optional. Trying to draw an arbitrary line at when you feel it’s “more” optional is silly.
Lines have to be drawn somehow. What are you trying to say - that women should just be paid to stay home forever?
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
It is nutritionally complementary and my son couldn't drink milk. Breast milk is more nutritional compared to soy almond or coconut. So yes it was necessary and I did pump until 15 months that was the extent my job would provide a space but it would have been helpful to pump longer as we had to transition to no dairy milks for daycare and he lost weight so we had to find more caloric items to try because he couldn't have dairy nor avocado so fats were low.
There are formulas for that. And if you child had that severe of a dairy allergy, it was an unusual case and not really relevant to overall policy.
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
Everything about having children is voluntary, but still a public good. So you’re equally in favor of doing away with protections in the workplace for pregnant women? You’re not in support of paid parental leave? Or is it just that, as someone who dislikes women who breastfeed, you would like their lives to be a little bit worse?
No, because pregnancy, post-partum, and breastfeeding in the first year (to a lesser extent) are physical burdens on the woman’s body that need to be accomodated in the workplace. After a year, any continuing physical burden of breastfeeding is entirely the optional choice of the woman.
All of it is optional. Every part of the “physical burden” is optional. Trying to draw an arbitrary line at when you feel it’s “more” optional is silly.
We obviously draw lines, and accomodation for pregnancy and post-partum makes sense because objectively, most women have children (and now in many states they do not have a choice about that). If women are going to be in the workforce, they need that physical accomodation. But breastfeeding after 1 is not similarly a physical necessity related to childbearing. It falls onto the optional side - so optional that very few women do it. The need for accommodations is much lower, and the lack of accomodations does not prevent women from having children while in the workplace.
The same argument can be made about breastfeeding before one. Formula is available in every grocery store, so there’s no reason to allow lactation breaks at all by your logic. Then women can be even more productive in the workplace which obviously should be their all consuming goal.
Well I’m not a big proponent of breastfeeding protections at work for that reason. I would much rather have had that political capital spent on more leave time (even unpaid FMLA). the “protection” of allowing unpaid breaks to pump milk at work is really just yet another way the public health world has chosen to target women’s unpaid labor as a way to achieve their policy goals. because hey, it costs nobody and women are easy targets to persuade!
Why are you pretending there is a tension between the two? We could have longer leave time *and* workplace protection for nursing. Why create false scarcity if not to foment additional conflict between women?
Why pretend these protections don't have costs to your employer and/or your coworkers. I've been in a woman-led organization in a country with 12 month paid maternity leave (for mothers, not fathers). I saw how having a fifth of the staff go on maternity leave (one of them twice) in three years affected the organization and the female director's perspective on hiring women of childbearing age. I myself had to do uncompensated work because one of them came back part time so I had to do her job on the days she was not there (I left that job). Acting like you can just mandate everything and demand that employers bear the costs is dumb and harmful to women.
Lots of things have costs for employers. Have you ever considered how expensive health benefits are? Paid vacation? Sabbaticals? Subsidized parking? Rent for offices?
Organizations have money for the things that matter and the things that attract high performing employees. Public policies that protect those rights are what will keep them from being only available to women at a certain socioeconomic level, and also available to people who work hourly.
Yes. And we’re saying that an employees entirely voluntary decision to pump uneccesarily is not something worthy of the cost of accommodation. Or, just give everyone a little extra leave to do what they want with.
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
It is nutritionally complementary and my son couldn't drink milk. Breast milk is more nutritional compared to soy almond or coconut. So yes it was necessary and I did pump until 15 months that was the extent my job would provide a space but it would have been helpful to pump longer as we had to transition to no dairy milks for daycare and he lost weight so we had to find more caloric items to try because he couldn't have dairy nor avocado so fats were low.
There are formulas for that. And if you child had that severe of a dairy allergy, it was an unusual case and not really relevant to overall policy.
Wasnt an allergy. It was an intolerance- CMPI. Formula is not suggested for over 1 year and DF formula is not covered by insurance after 1year unless there are no other foods. I was directed by a board certified allergist to continue BF, if I was willing to, to meet his nutritional needs. He is 4 and still intolerant to everything but baked dairy. We have done the dairy challenge 2 previous times prior to this most recent round that started a little after he turned 4.
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
Everything about having children is voluntary, but still a public good. So you’re equally in favor of doing away with protections in the workplace for pregnant women? You’re not in support of paid parental leave? Or is it just that, as someone who dislikes women who breastfeed, you would like their lives to be a little bit worse?
No, because pregnancy, post-partum, and breastfeeding in the first year (to a lesser extent) are physical burdens on the woman’s body that need to be accomodated in the workplace. After a year, any continuing physical burden of breastfeeding is entirely the optional choice of the woman.
All of it is optional. Every part of the “physical burden” is optional. Trying to draw an arbitrary line at when you feel it’s “more” optional is silly.
We obviously draw lines, and accomodation for pregnancy and post-partum makes sense because objectively, most women have children (and now in many states they do not have a choice about that). If women are going to be in the workforce, they need that physical accomodation. But breastfeeding after 1 is not similarly a physical necessity related to childbearing. It falls onto the optional side - so optional that very few women do it. The need for accommodations is much lower, and the lack of accomodations does not prevent women from having children while in the workplace.
The same argument can be made about breastfeeding before one. Formula is available in every grocery store, so there’s no reason to allow lactation breaks at all by your logic. Then women can be even more productive in the workplace which obviously should be their all consuming goal.
Well I’m not a big proponent of breastfeeding protections at work for that reason. I would much rather have had that political capital spent on more leave time (even unpaid FMLA). the “protection” of allowing unpaid breaks to pump milk at work is really just yet another way the public health world has chosen to target women’s unpaid labor as a way to achieve their policy goals. because hey, it costs nobody and women are easy targets to persuade!
Why are you pretending there is a tension between the two? We could have longer leave time *and* workplace protection for nursing. Why create false scarcity if not to foment additional conflict between women?
Why pretend these protections don't have costs to your employer and/or your coworkers. I've been in a woman-led organization in a country with 12 month paid maternity leave (for mothers, not fathers). I saw how having a fifth of the staff go on maternity leave (one of them twice) in three years affected the organization and the female director's perspective on hiring women of childbearing age. I myself had to do uncompensated work because one of them came back part time so I had to do her job on the days she was not there (I left that job). Acting like you can just mandate everything and demand that employers bear the costs is dumb and harmful to women.
Lots of things have costs for employers. Have you ever considered how expensive health benefits are? Paid vacation? Sabbaticals? Subsidized parking? Rent for offices?
Organizations have money for the things that matter and the things that attract high performing employees. Public policies that protect those rights are what will keep them from being only available to women at a certain socioeconomic level, and also available to people who work hourly.
Yes. And we’re saying that an employees entirely voluntary decision to pump uneccesarily is not something worthy of the cost of accommodation. Or, just give everyone a little extra leave to do what they want with.
Says…you? Not says my employer (already). Not says Google, Amazon, or EY where I personally know people who are pumping past 12 months. So you’re saying, save the Walton’s of the world a few thousand dollars (but not really since it’s unpaid…) and create even more division between wealthy and poor babies? Just to make the world a little harder on people whose choices you don’t like?
Anonymous wrote:It’s really all about the culture of safety-ism for children. Because we live in a society with a lacking social safety net, lawsuits are typically how damages are handled. The AAP is just recommending doctors to say the safest thing so they can’t be sued. In reality, this is not what it looks like on the ground.
I had a baby in 2017 and in 2020. Both times. I brought my own formula to the hospital just in case. With my youngest, I offered some because his latch was a little funky. The nurse was like “you didn’t need to bring that.” Also, both babies went to the nursery for a few hours. It was offered to me. On the website, it says that they room in. But in reality they don’t want you falling asleep holding the baby.
My pediatrician recommended supplementing with no hesitation. When the pediatrician asks where the baby slept, I just didn’t mention that it was mostly in my arms. No doctor is going to recommend cosleeping but moms do what works.
I wish there was some way to reach out to pregnant women and urge them to ignore the culture of safetyism from their first child. It would save so many women from immense mental suffering. I went through it with my first. He wanted nothing to do with the bassinet, so I just didn’t sleep. Raging postpartum anxiety that lasted for years impacted us both.
Parents do drop babies more often in baby-friendly hospitals. It is a thing that happens. Babies get injured because of this.
yes but it isnt solely dropped from breastfeeding. Also if they would make sidecar cribs to the bed, it would be easier. If there was more nursing staff so the ratio was 1:4, meaning if its 1 baby plus 1 mother then they only have two rooms. Or having a separate nurse for mom and baby, with mother ratio being 1:4 mothers and infants being 1:2.
The nursery option wasnt great either. In 2008 ratios of nurses to infants in the nursery was 1:8. 8 infants....newborns who need feeding, burping, rocking, diaper changes, temp checks, bilirubin checks, etc. No thank you.
It does not matter if the specific mother was breastfeeding. The policies are justified based on increasing breastfeeding. In reality it is a cost cutting measure and the victims are new mothers and babies. The AAP should get seriously slammed for this. Sorry you don't like the nursery but to me it is worth babies not getting skull fractures and developing seizures. Our country really, really hates women and babies, JFC.
Just because a hospital cuts costs and blames breastfeeding support doesn’t make actual breastfeeding support the problem. They could increase nursing staff, upgrade the equipment, add home-visits and “blame” breastfeeding support for that.
It's a breastfeeding support initiative. Make all the excuses you want, lactivism has become a cultist, misogynist religion. I think breastfeeding is a great choice when it is a choice, not when women are harangued into doing it for benefits that continue to be exaggerated by organizations like the AAP.
I am super pro breastfeeding for those who want to, but if the AAP would focus on the really important things PP suggested (more nurses per mother/infant, more nurses in the nursery, shorter hours for medical staff, etc.) instead of making all the outcomes about whether people breastfeed or not it would be better for breastfeeding moms AND formula feeding moms. I bet you'd get more people willing to try breastfeeding if they weren't so miserably stressed anyway.
Heyo, all those things cost money. Much better to act like changing the mothers' behavior is the start and end of early childhood wellbeing. After all, women's labor is free to the system! I also have long believed that public health focuses on breastfeeding because they KNOW that new mothers are a susceptible audience. Nothing to do with the actual costs and benefits of interventions; they just know that women can be pressured.
I just don’t understand WHY, I guess. What is the super important health benefit that EVERYONE has to breastfeed for 2+ years, in a developed country where we have clean water and baby formula? The last I looked into this (years ago), the only benefit that was outside of controlling for factors like family income, day care/non day care, education, etc. was a small reduction on a population - not even individual - level basis in ear infections and diarrhea. And that pumped and stored milk loses even those small benefits. Is that really worth all the hand wringing that new moms do about BFing?
The reccomendation isn’t that everyone has to nurse for two years. It’s that people who want to nurse past one, whose babies want to nurse last one, should be supported in doing so.
Also the benefits after one year primarily are a reduced cancer risk for the mother. I feel like that should matter.
Being pregnant and giving birth also reduces your risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but you don’t see these organizations telling women to get pregnant and have kids if they don’t want to. Birth control use also reduces BC risk and is a lot less invasive on your life.
They’re not saying to nurse if you don’t want to either— they’re saying if you and your infant want to nurse past one year, you should be supported in that choice by your pediatrician and your workplace. That’s what “mutually desired” means in the recommendation.
Why is there no recommendation that pediatricians and workplaces support other feeding choices? Other feeding choices can involve a lot of time or be less common, like a vegan diet.
What evidence exists that pediatricians and workplaces routinely impose barriers to a vegan diet?
AAP should give the feeding wars a break and issue workplace recommendations on nap time for new mothers.
Like how they explicitly call for longer, paid, maternity leave as part of these recommendations?
So much public health advice seems rooted in women not even attempting to hold down a job.
Buying formula should not be a requirement to a woman having a job and a child unless her desire is to feed formula. Professional women and wealthy women are given lactation lounges at work, mandatory breaks, and other supports to breastfeeding. Those should be widely available not replaced by another consumer product.
No, they should not get “mandatory breaks” that other workers don’t get to express breast milk for their over 1-year-old CHILD (not infant).
Yeah sorry you’ve lost me. Unpaid breaks in a clean room are not to much to expect.
then I should also get a break to go grocery shopping for my 1 year old.
Why?
Because pumping after 1 is purely a matter of personal preference and not nutritionally necessary for the child. So I should also get time off during the day to work on my voluntary choices for feeding my family.
Everything about having children is voluntary, but still a public good. So you’re equally in favor of doing away with protections in the workplace for pregnant women? You’re not in support of paid parental leave? Or is it just that, as someone who dislikes women who breastfeed, you would like their lives to be a little bit worse?
No, because pregnancy, post-partum, and breastfeeding in the first year (to a lesser extent) are physical burdens on the woman’s body that need to be accomodated in the workplace. After a year, any continuing physical burden of breastfeeding is entirely the optional choice of the woman.
All of it is optional. Every part of the “physical burden” is optional. Trying to draw an arbitrary line at when you feel it’s “more” optional is silly.
Lines have to be drawn somehow. What are you trying to say - that women should just be paid to stay home forever?
No one is paying anyone, the AAP is recommending the policies that allow women to pump to a year (unpaid, with a billion carve-outs) should be extended a modest two years.
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