Thank you all for these comments💞 It takes a lot to get a post published and I have to focus on my kiddos now for a while. I hate waiting to reply but alas this the life of a mother/writer!
It just gets tiresome to constantly hear that your circumstances are outside of the ideal. I think it produces a natural defensiveness (which I know you’ve talked about), but I also think people lack sensitivity in bringing up these things in conversation. If you asked me point blank the best way to give birth and feed a baby, I would say natural birth and breastfeeding. But my reality is 4 c-sections and a lot of formula. I think it’s reasonable that a couple experiencing infertility may not want to hear advice from the couple that effortlessly conceives by blinking at each other. Or the mom who is getting divorced for the well-being of her kids doesn’t need a book about the negative consequences of divorce! I know I get that way about birth conversations!! I don’t know what the answer is because I certainly believe in advocating for good things but we also live in a broken world. Sometimes it feels like people’s zeal for good things trumps compassion for the person in front of them.
Mm, thank you for this thoughtful comment. I hear you and I agree that people in general are not as sensitive and thoughtful as they should be. I just get really tired of the mainstream motherhood narratives that are really and actually harming women (but get lifted up as the virtuous/"kind" things to say and think). I do hope you felt nuance and compassion come through in this piece, as I personally never want to be someone valuing ideas over people. Thank you again for sharing these thoughts.
I think you're brave for tackling the cultural motherhood mess. It probably requires a really direct approach because there is so much confusion. (And I hate how everything these days requires a million disclaimers so I hope not to be contributing to that). To be honest, I've long been pondering how to speak truth about certain subjects without alienating those who feel on the outside for whatever reason. It is really challenging!
Yeah it’s definitely tricky. I’ve been in this space (analysis of the motherhood experience) for a while and have only pretty recently (in the last year or so) determined that it’s time to start sharing a little more boldly the things I think and have experienced. I feel like people are ready. And others are starting to speak out too which also makes it feel like it’s time. But yes, people are always the priority for me, and women and mothers are hurting, so it’s delicate for sure.
It is really challenging. I wonder if it’s because societally, we want everything boiled down to a slogan and then people use the slogan to push policy. Whereas our ancestors would have had a community. Within community, things happen outside the norm and people understand because they’re right their along the people experiencing exceptions.
Love this. I’ve once heard that the truth is sometimes hurtful and unecessary. I do believe breast is best, but due to primary lactation failure, I formula fed. It would get old after a while if someone kept telling me the benefits of breastmilk when I clearly am aware. I just can’t utilize due to circumstances out of my control. It doesn’t make the truth invalid, it’s just not the time to talk about it.
OK, would you have died or did they pump you full of pitocin and other interventions, and then do a c-section after your blood pressure crashed and pat themselves on the back for a job well done? 👀
I think this is hard to know! I had an emergency c-section and felt so much relief for modern medicine but also grief/anger/etc that things didn’t go how I expected. I also was rear ended the week before my due date, water broke without contractions starting a week after the accident, got pitocin and then found out there was placental abruption. What ultimately caused the abruption? I can never know for sure, but I do know that how things ended up, my baby would’ve died without modern medicine and I am grateful for that reason!
Oof, I see you in your experiences with your first birth! That is intense. I agree that it can be hard to know for sure, but the thing is that medical professionals are never in the wrong and are always heroes, so most people come away feeling like “thank goodness for modern medicine.” There is never ownership of mistakes or recommendations that maybe led to worse outcomes, even though this happens all the time. Doctors are on pedestals culturally and we are thus not confident in questioning them and forever thanking them for things. They are not bad people (my two brothers are both in medicine!), and their job is difficult to do well in a system driven by profit and with training that has no focus on root cause. But the patronizing vibe—which is especially prominent in obstetrics—almost always leads people to be super thankful for the interventions they had. Sometimes we should be grateful, of course, absolutely. More often, as I said in the piece, the system in one way or another caused the problem and then took credit for solving it. An example would be preeclampsia. My midwife counseled me on how to eat to avoid it. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t have still developed it, but she informed me. Typical OBs do absolutely no nutritional counseling, but when preeclampsia appears, they’re ready to deal with it! Does that make sense? If they didn’t suck so much in the first place—whether it’s things they don’t do or things they do do—birthing women wouldn’t need their interventions as often and could just be supported to do what their bodies were made to do, and stand by in case of real emergency (which placental abruption absolutely is, to be clear).
I don't think you're being long-winded here--there's so much to say on this topic! One thing that drives me crazy about the idea that moms breastfeed OR use formula, is that I know so many mothers who have done ALL the types of feeding, supplementing, or pumping, donated milk, formula. It's so not a "mommy wars" thing and I hate hearing it talked about like that.
And what about the moms who can hardly afford formula, or their baby is allergic to the cheap stuff and they have to find more expensive kinds? Fed is best? Really? I hear about this all the time and it breaks my heart because I think, "What if they could have had more support in breastfeeding?"
And when I hear a mom tell me with sadness in their voice that they only were able breastfeed for 2 months, I don't say flippantly, "Well, fed is best!" No, I say something like, "Yeah, that's hard, I've had to wean some of mine before I was ready. But also, way-to-go for nursing your babe for 2 months, that's awesome!"
I've breastfed all my babies, but I also had to use formula with my first two, because of pregnancies close together. I've also used donated breast milk.
I also, like you, had to use a nipple shield (thank you kind nurse at the hospital!) with my first and it was super helpful!
With my 4th kid it was a rough birth experience for Baby and I, and his first feeding was with formula. Recommended by my midwives. I happened to have some on hand from a formula sample sent in the mail. It was just what he needed to perk up and started nursing soon after. Very fast labor, and 10 lbs. 8oz baby who was 2 weeks overdue.
With my 6th, my friend who was at my home birth ended up nursing the baby for me when I had to be emergency transferred to the hospital. Sure, someone could say, "Fed is best," but I had to grieve missing that very first feeding. Even though I was so so thankful that my friend did that!
And one more thing-- and now I'm being long-winded. Haha. I remember early in my motherhood, during a MOPS meeting, I saw another mom nursing her squirmy baby without a cover. Without a cover! I was shocked at first because I'd never seen moms do this in public even though we were just at a MOPS meeting with a bunch of other moms. It made a profound impact on me, and I didn't worry so much about using a cover after that. I love the point you make about needing cultural, mom-to-mom change to normalize breastfeeding, and not just policy change.
Thank you for sharing all these experiences and insights with us! And you're right - there is actually so much more to say. Thanks again for this lovely comment!
It’s so funny because IRL I’ve never heard a woman “shame” another woman for breast or bottle feeding. I’ve also never been made to feel bad about whatever choice I’ve made. It’s almost entirely online and made up.
Amber, I usually really like your posts. But I found this one an interesting contrast with the one on grief—mainly the paragraph towards the top about how some women seem to get defensive about their story, which strikes me as a little too flippant/hubristic/dismissive of these women’s perspective. (Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in… 28 weeks and full of hormones 🙃 but wanted to chime in.) Because yes, historically birth has always been dangerous. Everyone knew this in the past: birth was always potentially life or death. Women didn’t feel so entitled to having a certain kind of birth, the way many seem to now (I include my past self in this, speaking from experience).
As I shared in the comment section in your grief article, my own perspective on this radically shifted after my first birth, which was a planned/emergency c-section (planned because of fetal malposition, emergency because I went into labor at 38 weeks). So it was a relatively calm experience, just at 4 in the morning instead of 8 :) The reason for the cesarean did not have anything to do with the cascade of interventions, or whatever. It was our reasoned choice, as well as the recommendation of the birth center I was originally at.
So yes, women who can have intervention-free births are lucky. And I am lucky, too, to have had a safe, calm, and successful birth, surgery or no. My birth experience taught me that we can’t take anything for granted around pregnancy, birth, or beyond. We are so fragile, so dependent.
I’m all for natural birth and will be praying and working for a VBAC. But I no longer have that hubris that so many seem to display. Early in my first pregnancy I participated in an online forum with a free birth expert who, unfortunately, completely belittled my concerns about life and death. I was asking her about working with an uncertified midwife who did homebirths in my area, but my husband had found lawsuits against her by couples whose babies she had delivered stillborn. She said and I quote, “yeah, some babies are going to die.” Such flippancy, such ideological callousness. This is the polar opposite of what I think birth should teach us: humility, gratitude, respect. Does that make sense?
Hi Catie! I appreciate you sharing all this and I'm taking it in. I'll share that I'm feeling a bit boxed in here and am not going to reply with all I think and feel (I just replied to a long comment and need to go make breakfast for my kids soon).
I do truly appreciate your vulnerability in sharing your experiences and I can absolutely understand what you mean. I'm not sure if you read my home birth story I recently published, but I absolutely did not feel entitled to the birth going a certain way. I chose it with great intention after weighing it carefully (and I still had anxiety about it all throughout my pregnancy and even somewhat into the birth), and I'm eternally grateful it went so well. Birth as a topic is so tricky. I'm realizing I haven't written much about it here on Substack and need/want to. You also might be interested in a post I wrote about a movie that centers a homebirth gone awry. It's called "Pieces of a Woman," and it touches on some of the things you're talking about.
Take care, and I'll be thinking about your feedback. I've appreciated your readership and perspective.
Agreed. I will be honest - I think breastfeeding and birth are quite different in this respect, and conflating them weakens the overall argument. In my own immediate family, my sister-in-law had a massive hemorrhage during an otherwise intervention-free labor, and without an emergency c-section and a blood transfusion, she would certainly have died. In fact, she almost died even with all of that. I had a high leak during my pregnancy that ultimately required induction because I was starting to become feverish and they feared sepsis - fortunately I was at 39 weeks so my son didn’t need exceptional treatments of any sort after birth. I went to high school with a girl whose mother died in childbirth in 1980.
Birth has always been dangerous - it was long referred to as a woman’s battlefield, after all - and it’s actually the very success we’ve had in medical treatment that has made it so safe that people no longer seem to remember that childbirth was the leading cause of death for women until the modern era. It varied by time and location, but odds of death in childbirth were as high as one in eight *per birth* in colonial America, and the odds the child would die were even higher.
Hi there, just saw your comment and will reply quickly before I have to log off for a while! I don't mean to conflate them totally, just illustrate some of the same thinking I've seen about both topics. (You're still welcome to think my argument is weak, of course.) My general view on birth is that at this point in time it has been over-medicalized. We need to find the balance as a society in trusting women's bodies to give birth as they were designed to and intervening when there is something that requires it. Serena Sigillito recently wrote a great piece about this: https://open.substack.com/pub/serenasigillito/p/the-story-of-my-birth?r=22tzy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I think that’s absolutely right, and I should add for completeness that one of my closest friends had a terrible birth experience due almost entirely to intense pressure for interventions due to failure to progress. There were no signs of fetal distress, her water hadn’t broken, she was just…taking longer to dilate than the on-call doctor from her practice wanted. It was only because her husband was willing to get very shirty with the doctor that she was allowed to continue laboring naturally. The on-call doctor finally rotated off, a new one came on who declared that there was no reason to interrupt the natural progress of labor under her specific circumstances, and she delivered without interventions to speed labor about 6 hours later. But the experience of facing that pressure from a doctor during a very vulnerable time in her life really left lasting scars. So I have absolutely seen the damage of over-medicalization as well.
I will also note that the over-medicalization issue extends to other areas of women’s health, in my experience. Even things like the complete scorn many (most?) OBGYNs show toward the use of NFP/FAM to plan pregnancies. I get that it’s not a great choice for women who are not in stable relationships (although I would propose that women who are not in stable relationships would be better off foregoing sexual activity at all, I do understand that conversation is not the OBGYN’s to have…), but for me, a married mother of multiple children?
I’m a mom of three who breastfed my first two 16+ months and hope to do the same with #3; I love breastfeeding. Also, I read your Substack because I appreciate your voice and take on motherhood. It’s enough like mine to feel seen, but different enough that I’m challenged. But something about this piece makes me uncomfortable in a different way.
I don’t take issue with your points, but i think a different approach would yield a more fruitful discussion. Though I appreciate and use a “let’s call bullsh*t” attitude in the right context, I think a post aimed at women and moms about breastfeeding is not the place for it due to the tender, deeply personal and vulnerable nature of breastfeeding.
Along with the tone, I think the “lie/truth” structure digs trenches deeper for those on the different “sides” of this discussion. And for those who would love to see women more empowered to breastfeed (me🙋🏻♀️), I’m not sure this piece expands our imaginations about how we might engage the discussion of breastfeeding and maternal wellbeing with those of different experience and opinions with humility, vulnerability, creativity and empathy so that we can make meaningful change.
That said, I realize I might be projecting what I want to see more of in discussions around breastfeeding (and I hear these discussions a lot as a women’s ministry director of a church with a lot of young moms) versus what your actual purpose is.
Ok! It’s literally time to breastfeed my babe. Peace ✌️
Appreciate all you shared here in these comments, Abigail! I always love reading a good post and then coming back to learn from great takes in the discussion. If I may add my uninvited two cents... this post landed completely differently for me, perhaps because the five concepts Amber framed as lies usually seem to arise in clinical settings from "authorities" to moms dealing with complex nursing situations. I am struggling to think of a single time when I've heard these expressed from mom to mom in my community. And because these statements so often come from perceived authorities and not from fellow breastfeeding moms, I do think the lie/truth structure is a very effective way to address these conversations. Given the pervasiveness of resources that offer help but then potentially create or exacerbate hurt and isolation within a woman's breastfeeding journey, any meaningful change likely will need to take into account both the way information has been corrupted in the available resources AND the real-time experience and support needs of every mother and baby within their family.
Hey there! Thanks for your feedback! I understand what you're saying and I think what I'd say in response is that in this piece I'm not speaking directly to or about moms; I'm speaking on a more macro level about ideas/talking points and how I think they don't serve women. When I talk with women as individuals, I definitely speak with gentleness! The tone/structure I chose is a result of my fed up-ness with mainstream media and broader cultural discourse (which affects individual mothers), and maybe was made a bit more intense by just having read a really terrible op-ed from the New York Times. Thank you for letting me know how this landed for you though! I have no confidence at all that I'll always get it right - I'm just a mom trying to make the time to say things I think are important!
I'd be open to hearing about your experiences with this topic, if you'd like to share more!
I appreciate your thoughtful reply. The following is long, because to riff on some famous author, I was too tired to write something short, ha! No pressure to read or engage.
Re: my experiences, breastfeeding (and I’d add my medicated hospital births) have been incredibly empowering experiences taught me about the goodness of my body, vulnerability, humility, self-sacrifice and that laid a foundation for my motherhood. I’m so thankful that I was able to breastfeed.
That said, both my experiences with birth and breastfeeding have made me a whole lot less interested in the choice a woman makes and a lot more interested in who she’s becoming through the process of making those choices and then the living the choice. There are good reasons to breastfeed and bad reasons to breastfeed. There are good reasons to formula feed and bad reasons to formula feed. As the practice of breastfeeding has formed me as a woman and mom, I know several women who have chosen to formula feed for one reason or another, and choice has shaped them in such beautiful ways, as mothers and women.
Breastfeeding might be the way it was supposed to be, but we live in a deeply broken world. And we see that brokenness in barriers to breastfeeding but also in how contentious the topic itself is and how we seek to validate ourselves as mothers by the choice to do so (not saying that’s what you’re doing… just that’s my own tendency life and what I’ve observed among some moms I know).
I think breast-feeding mothers need more support than they get and more empowerment to just live their lives and breastfeed while doing so.
Moreover, I (and my children) are the beneficiary of my husband’s generous paternity leave, my husband and mom who kept our household afloat while I rested and fed my baby, friends who looked at my latch, a church who brought my family meals for 6+ weeks, a work environment where I could bring and nurse my child, etc.
I grieve that that’s not every woman’s experience and I’m doing all I can in my small corner of the world to shift the culture so that women and children are cared for how they ought to be, and I’d love to see more women feel confident and able to breastfeed as a result.
My aim in motherhood is secure attachment with my children (along with teaching my kids to love God and neighbor). And from where I sit, both formula and breastfeeding can be a means to that end.
(And to be clear, I’m just sharing my thoughts here more in reply to your comment, not trying to argue with your post).
The inclination to heavily lean on the need for policy change is well intentioned but ultimately it leaves power in the hands of others. Women don’t need permission to breastfeed. We just need to do it. In public, for at least the amount of time that is biologically sound, in spite of jobs or unsupportive partners or mothers in law. Just do it. Do it and your children will see what is normal. Do it and actually commit and companies will eventually have to further shift those policies as a result of the natural demands of the nursing mother and her baby. Do it and partners will see the needs of the dyad and step up to provide more. Do it and men won’t sexualize it the way they do now (at least not to the extent that they do now-I’m willing to be lactation fetishes do not exist in tribal cultures). Do it and other women will see you doing it and feel it is possible for them. Defiant alignment with physiology is what women need, and it is what will shift culture. Then we can fuss with policy.
The start of breastfeeding both of my kids was one of the hardest things I've done and I'm so glad I fought for it. I also had to use nipple shields at the beginning for both and it's really what allowed us to start breastfeeding on the right foot. A lot of it is anatomical-- their mouths are so little & some babies need that extra aid! I went on to nurse my oldest 1.5 years and my youngest 2 years.
I worked really, really hard to nurse my tongue-tied babies and exclusively pumped, every 2 hours, for 24 hours, for 2 months until they latched. I then nursed for a year before I decided to wean. I enjoyed breastfeeding but I don't know if it's the end-all-be-all. I also don't expect everyone to have the support necessary to pump the way I did and work on the latch etc. It was truly a full time job and then some.
I like Emily Oster's books and her point that the health benefits to breastfeeding are pretty limited to newborn phase to the start of solids or so makes a lot of sense. And of course before formula, women gave babies goat's milks, cow's milk, sheep's milk etc in a supplementary fashion quite often. So the best 'reason' to continue long term breastfeeding is because the mom likes it. If she does, great, breastfeed forever with all the support you need! But it's probably different for every Mom. I was VERY over it by a year and much happier when I weaned. If we have another I think I probably will nurse for less time, but we'll see.
I think an added issue for me was that I came into breastfeeding thinking of it as something I HAD to do as a requirement of motherhood. My Mom wrote a book about breastfeeding, one of the first to really advocate for it, back in the early 90s. She was an executive and rallying for working Moms to be able to nurse. She was a superhero for that and it's awesome. But it became like a religion to her and I *do* think she got very judgy about women not breastfeeding. So it was hard for me to see options around feeding a baby because my own mother made it seem so intensely necessary to breastfeed.
I'm proud of what I did to be able to nurse my babies and I tell all my friends I WILL come to your house anytime of day or night and help you with the latch or anything at all. It's beautiful to feel capable and strong in our bodies, but I do agree with the article you shared that 'maternal well being' is more important than any one of these parenting decisions - breastfeeding, co-sleeping (which I also hated beyond newborn phase and my Mom loved well into little kid life), etc, etc. Dr. Sears completely ruined my life as a first time Mom and when I stopped following attachment parenting "style" I became a happy, joyful Mom again. I actually didn't follow any 'style' - I just did what was right for me and my baby at the time and life went on.
Studies show that trauma around birth etc has less to do with what actually happened in any given birth and more the idea that you had AGENCY to make informed choices. Many women do feel empowered after c-sections, inductions, etc. If they are fully informed, knowledgable, and feel they are respected. I had two inductions (I had GD) and two very different experiences. The first go round I felt out of my head scared and confused and overmedicated and it's a miracle things didn't end in a c section. The second time I knew what was coming and I felt strong, in control, and proud when they put my baby on my chest. It had gone SO WELL!
I also unfortunately think mothers are some of the most judgmental people. And it makes sense why. Mothers make immense sacrifices for their kids and they want validation for their choices. It can be confusing when someone makes an obviously different choice for their kids because people start questioning themselves... really? I thought this was the only way? I wish it wasn't like this, but it is.
I never felt odd about nursing out and about and I applaud and encourage all women to breastfeed wherever they like. As the Pope said, if the baby is hungry, nurse them! But I know people feel differently about this.
I think generally it's less about normalizing breastfeeding - one aspect of motherhood - and more that we just need to normalize women and baby out and about living life together - nursing, bottle feeding, crying, carrying, wearing, stroller walking - just the whole 9 yards. Family life is very hidden generally and we need to let that chaos loose into the world culture of life style.
Hi Katie! Oh my goodness - so much work you did! I did the same (exclusively pumped) for my first, but just for a week or so! And it was SO MUCH. Oof. Kudos to you. I've never had a tie with any of my babies but I've heard that can be so hard.
You know, I read Emily Oster's first book and loved it. I haven't read any others, but I will say I've sensed a shift in her work just from following her a bit on social media. It seems she's much more, shall we say, mainstream in her positions now, where as her first book (Expecting Better) was really about pushing against mainstream recommendations in pregnancy. An interesting voice for sure.
Thanks for sharing about your mom and how all that impacted you. What groundbreaking work your mom was doing in the 90s!
As for the NYT piece/ maternal well-being vs. parenting choices, I see a lot to unpack there. I also didn't co-sleep much past age 1 (I like my bed to myself), and I also don't consider myself an "attachment parent." I absolutely agree that what makes a good birth is the woman's experience of and agency in that birth, not the specifics of how it happened: I actually wrote a post saying just that on my old blog (didn't actually know there was research behind it!).
I think I'd say that mothers are the most defensive, not the most judgmental (for the same reasons you mentioned).
I'm glad you never felt uncomfortable nursing in public. That's awesome. Unfortunetly, most women don't feel that way, which is upsetting to me. When I see a mother trying to latch her baby under a cover (especially when she pulls it up over her head, which I know is just a logistical thing but which feels symbolic) I get close to enraged. Not at the woman, of course, but at a culture that loves boobs out except when they're doing the thing they were literally made for, and that the vibe is such that a newly postpartum mother - whom we should all be revering and catering to - has to fight with a piece of cloth to feed her baby. Even the nursing rooms that are like sad little closets bother me (the swanky ones are fine, ha). I'd much rather live in a world where mothers just fed their babies wherever, whenever, and no one thought a thing of it. Or bottle-feeding or doing any number of care tasks, as you mentioned. (Agree totally with your last sentence!)
In sum, I'm not one to lift up breastfeeding in some sort of all-or-nothing, moralistic, religious way. But I do see a need to advocate for it as the biological norm that is good for both babies and mothers.
I think we need to ask ourselves why breastfeeding has become optional though. It is only via formula marketing and women being taken out of the home in order to bolster the market as taxpayers (rather than working in home with children underfoot to bolster the FAMILY economy) that it has become so. We are mammals. Birthing a baby is followed by nursing a baby. The fact that we hem and haw over studies and statistics about the thing that literally carried our species to survival is laughable. We all need to remember that we are animals with instincts.
I too felt completely comfortable nursing in public. And it’s funny - before I had my first, I thought I would be shy about it, but nope. It felt so natural to me that I never thought twice about it. I nursed in church, in airports, in restaurants…pretty much anywhere.
I love that and I was the same (felt pretty comfortable and if people felt uncomfortable that was 100% their problem not mine). As Emily Hancock wrote in her comment, I think that's one of the biggest things we can do to change things: just doing it. No big deal.
I've breasfed three kids, exclusively pumped for one, donated milk to a local NICU and shared some with a friend who needed it. Through all of that, there was incredibly little support for me as a woman with oversupply. It's the reason I exclusively pumped with my first, and it was the cause of my 5 bouts with mastitis. Weaning was awful. It's like they teach medical professionals that every single woman has low supply, and then when you don't they look at you like, "So what's the problem, you have enough milk." I wish I could go back and educate myself before having my first, because I'm positive that with what I know now, I could have successfully nursed her like the others.
Hey lady! Ugh. I do think it's actually quite complex and can very so much woman to woman and (like I said in one of the points) not all support is actually supportive. Kudos to you for figuring it out and for all you had to do and go through. I see you!
Yes I totally agree! I meant to be standing in solidarity with you about the poor support in place for postpartum mamas in pretty much every area, breastfeeding included.
Every dang word! Thank you so much for this brilliant piece searing with needed clarity. Like you, I have really loved nursing. With all four of my babies the journey has been different. I never once felt judged for giving my babes formula when they had it. Where I did feel judged was when I shared how hard I worked to make nursing happen or how proud I was of being able to do it.
Thank you friend for your kind words and for sharing your experiences. I think any judgment or defensiveness people feel about using formula is actually deep frustration, shame, and/or grief (and I'm happy you didn't feel any). I used formula for a bit with my first and I'm going to try to dig back into my memory and write about that. I remember it all so clearly and it makes me teary to this day (the whole experience of learning to breastfeed for the first time, not just the use of formula).
I've had a wide spectrum of birth experiences (C-section, 2 hospital VBACs, and a home birth where my midwife did not arrive in time for the birth). My main reaction after reading that NYT article was sadness. I don't mean to sound condescending, but I do feel bad for this woman. Her conclusions sound like someone scoffing at the idea of having sex because they've had sperm technologically implanted in their uterus and it's basically the same.
I can only speak from my set of experiences. In my case, after my birth with just my husband, we both agreed that absolutely nothing from our three previous hospital births had come close to preparing us for what it felt like to bring our child into the world together at home. It was a qualitatively different experience altogether.
We all seem to understand mourning infertility and how devastating it is when our bodies seem to betray our natural ability to reproduce. So why can we not extend that to other areas of the reproductive cycle? Just as it can be devastating and grief-inducing not to be able to naturally conceive, it can be devastating and grief-inducing not to bring a conceived baby into the world in the way our bodies were designed to birth. What measure of healing for mothers and babies might happen if we welcomed that grief instead of insisting that things like surgical birth and having to feed our babies formula are really not a big deal?
I find this conversation so interesting, mostly because it hasn't changed that much in the 25-26 years or so that I've been paying attention. Anecdotally, I didn't get off to a great start breastfeeding my first, so his early months were a pretty stressful combination of pumping/bottlefeeding breastmilk and formula feeding, with a short window of successful nursing at the breast before he wound up exclusively bottlefed at around 6 months. There were so many ways our breastfeeding efforts were sabotaged in the beginning and it makes me sad because I wanted it to work so much.
My next four (all born out of hospital) were exclusively breastfed from the start, and all of them nursed well past two. I think I breastfed a combined total of about ten years, and I vastly preferred breastfeeding to bottle...once I had it all figured out, AND once I got past the early stages of nipple soreness which for me was really nothing like "soreness" and more like "excruciating pain" (nothing like hearing that if it hurts you're doing it wrong over and over, only to learn that for some women that's just the reality of the early experience...)
When comparing my kids, one thing I don't think gets talked about enough is the dental/orthodontic benefits. Only one of my younger four got braces, and they came off really fast, whereas my eldest had a very narrow jaw and jacked up front teeth. Coincidence or cause, I really can't say for sure, but I don't know that the orthodontic benefits of breastfeeding get as much attention as they should. (Also this may be more due to the delivery method - my oldest had bottles consistently from birth and took a pacifier, while my younger four almost never had bottles and wouldn't take pacis). But I find it an interesting anecdotal observation and worth noting for parents weighing the options. Braces are expensive, yo.
I had pretty strong feelings about breastfeeding as a young mom, which mellowed over time as I became more confident in my choices (I agree with you that most of what appears to be judgment is often defensiveness, Amber.) These days I truly don't care how anyone feeds her baby - it's just not my business. Still, I have never loved "fed is best" as a slogan - like you, to me it comes off as condescending, and also, it's just not accurate based on the data we have. Formula can be a useful tool or even a lifesaving alternative when breastmilk isn't available, but I don't think it actually does anyone any favors to try to save feelings by altering facts. Women are smarter than that.
Anyway, thanks for this thoughtful post! As someone who had much better birth experiences out of hospital than in and worked in a midwife-run, freestanding birth center in the early 00s, I can't bring myself to read the NYT article - sounds like the same lack of critical thinking and junk "journalism" that's been plaguing the woman-centered birth movement since I had my first home birth 24 years ago. If anything it's possibly gotten worse.
This was really interesting and informative! I am fairly new to living in Norway (I emigrated from the US), where I am about to have my first baby this fall. From what I understand, breastfeeding is the norm here with close to 80% of women breastfeeding exclusively for the 6 months. Because healthcare is administered by the state some people do feel a bit weird about midwives and public health nurses pushing breastfeeding as if it is a blanket a public health policy and not an individualized or sacred thing, but also nothing is really forced on you and there are a lot of classes and support for it. When I am back in the US, I do hear many yuppie friends talk about breastfeeding as if it is a hippie or overachiever thing, where it seems like just the standard in Norway.
I will say having been in the alternative medicine world (I went to acupuncture school in the US) there do exist plenty of people on their high horse about natural medicine (and do think people who use any kind of modern medical intervention are weak or inferior), so I don't think people are completely making it up that there are judgemental people out there. But I think being judged by a really small subculture of people really is secondary to being able to make the best decisions for yourself given your set of circumstances. Not all of us have the same range of options and some people really do have medical conditions which limit their choices (whether it comes to breastfeeding or a low intervention birth), but that shouldn't stop women who do have more options from considering them and talking about which of those options is best for them.
Thank you for sharing what you've seen in Norway vs. here! Super interesting (and totally tracks - the hippie/overachiever thing! That's spot on).
I agree with you that some are truly judgmental (I think I mentioned that super briefly). I was deep in crunchy culture for a while and I'm happy to be out. It definitely can get unhealthy!
Yeah, unfortunately I think the extremes of over-medicalization of pregnancy in the uS feeds a subculture of people that are hostile to anything medical as a reaction.
But I don't think that should detract from the larger point you make here, which is just because a minority of women can't breastfeed, doesn't mean we can't talk about the benefits of breastfeeding, or that it it's offensive to say that it's more desirable to have a culture that supports and celebrates breastfeeding because some women will feel left out.
After reading the NYT piece that you linked, I personally think this is just the right amount of sass— that article is so irritating and misleading (fortunately there are a fair amount of people piping up in protest in that article’s comment section) and I do think folks need to read that article in conjuction with this piece to better understand your tone and reasoning for conflating birth and breastfeeding.
Birth and breastfeeding are touchy topics; they’re deeply personal and also universal in motherhood and it’s really hard to write about them. I think you have done a good job navigating that touchiness and clarifying your stance, and with great kindness. I appreciate what you said in one of these comments regarding people > ideas, that is something I will remember and hold close as I write and explore these topics as well.
Mm thanks so much. It’s very true that I was in a certain energetic space after reading that, and I basically wrote this in response. Thank you for seeing that and for letting me know your thoughts. And yes I did see a lot of people pushing back in the comments when I gave them a quick glance, which is great.
The narratives represented in that essay, which I believe stem from both grief and a subconscious desire to not be a woman who gets “too into” motherhood, are so pervasive and so influential. Unfortunately, the only other strong ideas about motherhood come from (Protestant) Christian culture and those have been lacking as well. I think we desperately need fresh ideas about motherhood, and I’m trying to someone bringing them forward. I see many others doing this as well. (You included!)
Thank you again for taking the time to leave these thoughts.
Thank you for being brave and writing this post, Am ber! I love that it has prompted so many thoughtful comments from people which hopefully all lead to fruitful contemplation and further discussion for women in their own communities!
I have heard that so many people have had such condescending experiences with lactation consultants and that makes me so sad. My experience with them at the hospital was SO validating and I am so grateful. (At one point while I wept, one of them assured me that every other mom in the postpartum wing was also struggling). They even have a line you can call every day of the week just to ask questions and get additional support. It is amazing, and it’s due to their support that I felt like I COULD do it. I triple fed for 2+ weeks at the beginning and they all even acknowledged how unsustainable it was. I am so grateful I did it though and that eventually both baby and I were able to figure it out. That being said, I can’t imagine having to have had to triple feed much longer. And even though breastfeeding is going pretty well, it’s been 4 months and there’s still times she screams so much and refuses to latch and it’s so hard. An hour ago actually 🫠
I’m grateful for everyone who commented and shared their differing experiences. I feel inspired to be a very intentional communal support for my mom friends having babies very soon.
Love all this so much! Thank you for your words and for sharing your experiences. It’s so interesting, so many people having bad experiences w lactation consultants (myself included). What is with that? Genuinely curious. So glad you were so supported, and yes, it can still be hard even with support. It’s such a beautiful thing to fight for though. AND it’s also okay to use some formula if it’s necessary (was just chatting with a friend tonight who recently started supplementing).
I’m so happy you feel excited/prepared to be a resource for other women. I think that’s really how we do it, that’s how we change things for the better for mothers. Writing sassy articles on the Internet isn’t gonna do it;)
I’m surprised at the number of women here who have used one! I think the lactation community should take note and stop demonizing them! Was yours supportive of it? Mine were not. I’d read about them myself and had my husband run to the store to get some. I tried and it immediately worked, and I remember clearly the feeling of overwhelming joy.
Wow yes they are the ones who gave it to me, especially because I was having pain initially/flat nipples. At a later appointment, after I had been home a week or so, whoever I met with (I saw multiple different consultants from the hospital) suggested I try latching her without it because she would be able to transfer more milk without it which turned out to be true. Not sure how that particular consultant would’ve responded if I desired to continue with a nipple shield/continued to have pain though.
That feeling of overwhelming joy when you can hear them finally gulping after so much struggle is so real 🥹
Thank you all for these comments💞 It takes a lot to get a post published and I have to focus on my kiddos now for a while. I hate waiting to reply but alas this the life of a mother/writer!
It just gets tiresome to constantly hear that your circumstances are outside of the ideal. I think it produces a natural defensiveness (which I know you’ve talked about), but I also think people lack sensitivity in bringing up these things in conversation. If you asked me point blank the best way to give birth and feed a baby, I would say natural birth and breastfeeding. But my reality is 4 c-sections and a lot of formula. I think it’s reasonable that a couple experiencing infertility may not want to hear advice from the couple that effortlessly conceives by blinking at each other. Or the mom who is getting divorced for the well-being of her kids doesn’t need a book about the negative consequences of divorce! I know I get that way about birth conversations!! I don’t know what the answer is because I certainly believe in advocating for good things but we also live in a broken world. Sometimes it feels like people’s zeal for good things trumps compassion for the person in front of them.
Mm, thank you for this thoughtful comment. I hear you and I agree that people in general are not as sensitive and thoughtful as they should be. I just get really tired of the mainstream motherhood narratives that are really and actually harming women (but get lifted up as the virtuous/"kind" things to say and think). I do hope you felt nuance and compassion come through in this piece, as I personally never want to be someone valuing ideas over people. Thank you again for sharing these thoughts.
I think you're brave for tackling the cultural motherhood mess. It probably requires a really direct approach because there is so much confusion. (And I hate how everything these days requires a million disclaimers so I hope not to be contributing to that). To be honest, I've long been pondering how to speak truth about certain subjects without alienating those who feel on the outside for whatever reason. It is really challenging!
Yeah it’s definitely tricky. I’ve been in this space (analysis of the motherhood experience) for a while and have only pretty recently (in the last year or so) determined that it’s time to start sharing a little more boldly the things I think and have experienced. I feel like people are ready. And others are starting to speak out too which also makes it feel like it’s time. But yes, people are always the priority for me, and women and mothers are hurting, so it’s delicate for sure.
It is really challenging. I wonder if it’s because societally, we want everything boiled down to a slogan and then people use the slogan to push policy. Whereas our ancestors would have had a community. Within community, things happen outside the norm and people understand because they’re right their along the people experiencing exceptions.
Love this. I’ve once heard that the truth is sometimes hurtful and unecessary. I do believe breast is best, but due to primary lactation failure, I formula fed. It would get old after a while if someone kept telling me the benefits of breastmilk when I clearly am aware. I just can’t utilize due to circumstances out of my control. It doesn’t make the truth invalid, it’s just not the time to talk about it.
“I would have died without modern medicine.”
OK, would you have died or did they pump you full of pitocin and other interventions, and then do a c-section after your blood pressure crashed and pat themselves on the back for a job well done? 👀
👀👀👀
I think this is hard to know! I had an emergency c-section and felt so much relief for modern medicine but also grief/anger/etc that things didn’t go how I expected. I also was rear ended the week before my due date, water broke without contractions starting a week after the accident, got pitocin and then found out there was placental abruption. What ultimately caused the abruption? I can never know for sure, but I do know that how things ended up, my baby would’ve died without modern medicine and I am grateful for that reason!
Oof, I see you in your experiences with your first birth! That is intense. I agree that it can be hard to know for sure, but the thing is that medical professionals are never in the wrong and are always heroes, so most people come away feeling like “thank goodness for modern medicine.” There is never ownership of mistakes or recommendations that maybe led to worse outcomes, even though this happens all the time. Doctors are on pedestals culturally and we are thus not confident in questioning them and forever thanking them for things. They are not bad people (my two brothers are both in medicine!), and their job is difficult to do well in a system driven by profit and with training that has no focus on root cause. But the patronizing vibe—which is especially prominent in obstetrics—almost always leads people to be super thankful for the interventions they had. Sometimes we should be grateful, of course, absolutely. More often, as I said in the piece, the system in one way or another caused the problem and then took credit for solving it. An example would be preeclampsia. My midwife counseled me on how to eat to avoid it. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t have still developed it, but she informed me. Typical OBs do absolutely no nutritional counseling, but when preeclampsia appears, they’re ready to deal with it! Does that make sense? If they didn’t suck so much in the first place—whether it’s things they don’t do or things they do do—birthing women wouldn’t need their interventions as often and could just be supported to do what their bodies were made to do, and stand by in case of real emergency (which placental abruption absolutely is, to be clear).
I don't think you're being long-winded here--there's so much to say on this topic! One thing that drives me crazy about the idea that moms breastfeed OR use formula, is that I know so many mothers who have done ALL the types of feeding, supplementing, or pumping, donated milk, formula. It's so not a "mommy wars" thing and I hate hearing it talked about like that.
And what about the moms who can hardly afford formula, or their baby is allergic to the cheap stuff and they have to find more expensive kinds? Fed is best? Really? I hear about this all the time and it breaks my heart because I think, "What if they could have had more support in breastfeeding?"
And when I hear a mom tell me with sadness in their voice that they only were able breastfeed for 2 months, I don't say flippantly, "Well, fed is best!" No, I say something like, "Yeah, that's hard, I've had to wean some of mine before I was ready. But also, way-to-go for nursing your babe for 2 months, that's awesome!"
I've breastfed all my babies, but I also had to use formula with my first two, because of pregnancies close together. I've also used donated breast milk.
I also, like you, had to use a nipple shield (thank you kind nurse at the hospital!) with my first and it was super helpful!
With my 4th kid it was a rough birth experience for Baby and I, and his first feeding was with formula. Recommended by my midwives. I happened to have some on hand from a formula sample sent in the mail. It was just what he needed to perk up and started nursing soon after. Very fast labor, and 10 lbs. 8oz baby who was 2 weeks overdue.
With my 6th, my friend who was at my home birth ended up nursing the baby for me when I had to be emergency transferred to the hospital. Sure, someone could say, "Fed is best," but I had to grieve missing that very first feeding. Even though I was so so thankful that my friend did that!
And one more thing-- and now I'm being long-winded. Haha. I remember early in my motherhood, during a MOPS meeting, I saw another mom nursing her squirmy baby without a cover. Without a cover! I was shocked at first because I'd never seen moms do this in public even though we were just at a MOPS meeting with a bunch of other moms. It made a profound impact on me, and I didn't worry so much about using a cover after that. I love the point you make about needing cultural, mom-to-mom change to normalize breastfeeding, and not just policy change.
Thank you for sharing all these experiences and insights with us! And you're right - there is actually so much more to say. Thanks again for this lovely comment!
This entire comment merits a quote of its own, Catherine. You have so much experience and wisdom wrapped up in the experiences you describe!
Thank you Jan!
The shield saved me, too! Used it for all of my babes and it was a God-send.
It’s so funny because IRL I’ve never heard a woman “shame” another woman for breast or bottle feeding. I’ve also never been made to feel bad about whatever choice I’ve made. It’s almost entirely online and made up.
Yeah, it seems like this is one of those things that mostly happens online. But maybe I just have really supportive people around me!
Amber, I usually really like your posts. But I found this one an interesting contrast with the one on grief—mainly the paragraph towards the top about how some women seem to get defensive about their story, which strikes me as a little too flippant/hubristic/dismissive of these women’s perspective. (Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in… 28 weeks and full of hormones 🙃 but wanted to chime in.) Because yes, historically birth has always been dangerous. Everyone knew this in the past: birth was always potentially life or death. Women didn’t feel so entitled to having a certain kind of birth, the way many seem to now (I include my past self in this, speaking from experience).
As I shared in the comment section in your grief article, my own perspective on this radically shifted after my first birth, which was a planned/emergency c-section (planned because of fetal malposition, emergency because I went into labor at 38 weeks). So it was a relatively calm experience, just at 4 in the morning instead of 8 :) The reason for the cesarean did not have anything to do with the cascade of interventions, or whatever. It was our reasoned choice, as well as the recommendation of the birth center I was originally at.
So yes, women who can have intervention-free births are lucky. And I am lucky, too, to have had a safe, calm, and successful birth, surgery or no. My birth experience taught me that we can’t take anything for granted around pregnancy, birth, or beyond. We are so fragile, so dependent.
I’m all for natural birth and will be praying and working for a VBAC. But I no longer have that hubris that so many seem to display. Early in my first pregnancy I participated in an online forum with a free birth expert who, unfortunately, completely belittled my concerns about life and death. I was asking her about working with an uncertified midwife who did homebirths in my area, but my husband had found lawsuits against her by couples whose babies she had delivered stillborn. She said and I quote, “yeah, some babies are going to die.” Such flippancy, such ideological callousness. This is the polar opposite of what I think birth should teach us: humility, gratitude, respect. Does that make sense?
Hi Catie! I appreciate you sharing all this and I'm taking it in. I'll share that I'm feeling a bit boxed in here and am not going to reply with all I think and feel (I just replied to a long comment and need to go make breakfast for my kids soon).
I do truly appreciate your vulnerability in sharing your experiences and I can absolutely understand what you mean. I'm not sure if you read my home birth story I recently published, but I absolutely did not feel entitled to the birth going a certain way. I chose it with great intention after weighing it carefully (and I still had anxiety about it all throughout my pregnancy and even somewhat into the birth), and I'm eternally grateful it went so well. Birth as a topic is so tricky. I'm realizing I haven't written much about it here on Substack and need/want to. You also might be interested in a post I wrote about a movie that centers a homebirth gone awry. It's called "Pieces of a Woman," and it touches on some of the things you're talking about.
Take care, and I'll be thinking about your feedback. I've appreciated your readership and perspective.
Agreed. I will be honest - I think breastfeeding and birth are quite different in this respect, and conflating them weakens the overall argument. In my own immediate family, my sister-in-law had a massive hemorrhage during an otherwise intervention-free labor, and without an emergency c-section and a blood transfusion, she would certainly have died. In fact, she almost died even with all of that. I had a high leak during my pregnancy that ultimately required induction because I was starting to become feverish and they feared sepsis - fortunately I was at 39 weeks so my son didn’t need exceptional treatments of any sort after birth. I went to high school with a girl whose mother died in childbirth in 1980.
Birth has always been dangerous - it was long referred to as a woman’s battlefield, after all - and it’s actually the very success we’ve had in medical treatment that has made it so safe that people no longer seem to remember that childbirth was the leading cause of death for women until the modern era. It varied by time and location, but odds of death in childbirth were as high as one in eight *per birth* in colonial America, and the odds the child would die were even higher.
Hi there, just saw your comment and will reply quickly before I have to log off for a while! I don't mean to conflate them totally, just illustrate some of the same thinking I've seen about both topics. (You're still welcome to think my argument is weak, of course.) My general view on birth is that at this point in time it has been over-medicalized. We need to find the balance as a society in trusting women's bodies to give birth as they were designed to and intervening when there is something that requires it. Serena Sigillito recently wrote a great piece about this: https://open.substack.com/pub/serenasigillito/p/the-story-of-my-birth?r=22tzy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I think that’s absolutely right, and I should add for completeness that one of my closest friends had a terrible birth experience due almost entirely to intense pressure for interventions due to failure to progress. There were no signs of fetal distress, her water hadn’t broken, she was just…taking longer to dilate than the on-call doctor from her practice wanted. It was only because her husband was willing to get very shirty with the doctor that she was allowed to continue laboring naturally. The on-call doctor finally rotated off, a new one came on who declared that there was no reason to interrupt the natural progress of labor under her specific circumstances, and she delivered without interventions to speed labor about 6 hours later. But the experience of facing that pressure from a doctor during a very vulnerable time in her life really left lasting scars. So I have absolutely seen the damage of over-medicalization as well.
I will also note that the over-medicalization issue extends to other areas of women’s health, in my experience. Even things like the complete scorn many (most?) OBGYNs show toward the use of NFP/FAM to plan pregnancies. I get that it’s not a great choice for women who are not in stable relationships (although I would propose that women who are not in stable relationships would be better off foregoing sexual activity at all, I do understand that conversation is not the OBGYN’s to have…), but for me, a married mother of multiple children?
I’m a mom of three who breastfed my first two 16+ months and hope to do the same with #3; I love breastfeeding. Also, I read your Substack because I appreciate your voice and take on motherhood. It’s enough like mine to feel seen, but different enough that I’m challenged. But something about this piece makes me uncomfortable in a different way.
I don’t take issue with your points, but i think a different approach would yield a more fruitful discussion. Though I appreciate and use a “let’s call bullsh*t” attitude in the right context, I think a post aimed at women and moms about breastfeeding is not the place for it due to the tender, deeply personal and vulnerable nature of breastfeeding.
Along with the tone, I think the “lie/truth” structure digs trenches deeper for those on the different “sides” of this discussion. And for those who would love to see women more empowered to breastfeed (me🙋🏻♀️), I’m not sure this piece expands our imaginations about how we might engage the discussion of breastfeeding and maternal wellbeing with those of different experience and opinions with humility, vulnerability, creativity and empathy so that we can make meaningful change.
That said, I realize I might be projecting what I want to see more of in discussions around breastfeeding (and I hear these discussions a lot as a women’s ministry director of a church with a lot of young moms) versus what your actual purpose is.
Ok! It’s literally time to breastfeed my babe. Peace ✌️
Appreciate all you shared here in these comments, Abigail! I always love reading a good post and then coming back to learn from great takes in the discussion. If I may add my uninvited two cents... this post landed completely differently for me, perhaps because the five concepts Amber framed as lies usually seem to arise in clinical settings from "authorities" to moms dealing with complex nursing situations. I am struggling to think of a single time when I've heard these expressed from mom to mom in my community. And because these statements so often come from perceived authorities and not from fellow breastfeeding moms, I do think the lie/truth structure is a very effective way to address these conversations. Given the pervasiveness of resources that offer help but then potentially create or exacerbate hurt and isolation within a woman's breastfeeding journey, any meaningful change likely will need to take into account both the way information has been corrupted in the available resources AND the real-time experience and support needs of every mother and baby within their family.
Hey there! Thanks for your feedback! I understand what you're saying and I think what I'd say in response is that in this piece I'm not speaking directly to or about moms; I'm speaking on a more macro level about ideas/talking points and how I think they don't serve women. When I talk with women as individuals, I definitely speak with gentleness! The tone/structure I chose is a result of my fed up-ness with mainstream media and broader cultural discourse (which affects individual mothers), and maybe was made a bit more intense by just having read a really terrible op-ed from the New York Times. Thank you for letting me know how this landed for you though! I have no confidence at all that I'll always get it right - I'm just a mom trying to make the time to say things I think are important!
I'd be open to hearing about your experiences with this topic, if you'd like to share more!
I appreciate your thoughtful reply. The following is long, because to riff on some famous author, I was too tired to write something short, ha! No pressure to read or engage.
Re: my experiences, breastfeeding (and I’d add my medicated hospital births) have been incredibly empowering experiences taught me about the goodness of my body, vulnerability, humility, self-sacrifice and that laid a foundation for my motherhood. I’m so thankful that I was able to breastfeed.
That said, both my experiences with birth and breastfeeding have made me a whole lot less interested in the choice a woman makes and a lot more interested in who she’s becoming through the process of making those choices and then the living the choice. There are good reasons to breastfeed and bad reasons to breastfeed. There are good reasons to formula feed and bad reasons to formula feed. As the practice of breastfeeding has formed me as a woman and mom, I know several women who have chosen to formula feed for one reason or another, and choice has shaped them in such beautiful ways, as mothers and women.
Breastfeeding might be the way it was supposed to be, but we live in a deeply broken world. And we see that brokenness in barriers to breastfeeding but also in how contentious the topic itself is and how we seek to validate ourselves as mothers by the choice to do so (not saying that’s what you’re doing… just that’s my own tendency life and what I’ve observed among some moms I know).
I think breast-feeding mothers need more support than they get and more empowerment to just live their lives and breastfeed while doing so.
Moreover, I (and my children) are the beneficiary of my husband’s generous paternity leave, my husband and mom who kept our household afloat while I rested and fed my baby, friends who looked at my latch, a church who brought my family meals for 6+ weeks, a work environment where I could bring and nurse my child, etc.
I grieve that that’s not every woman’s experience and I’m doing all I can in my small corner of the world to shift the culture so that women and children are cared for how they ought to be, and I’d love to see more women feel confident and able to breastfeed as a result.
My aim in motherhood is secure attachment with my children (along with teaching my kids to love God and neighbor). And from where I sit, both formula and breastfeeding can be a means to that end.
(And to be clear, I’m just sharing my thoughts here more in reply to your comment, not trying to argue with your post).
I agree with you. Wrong tone for this audience. At least imo
Speaking to your last point-
The inclination to heavily lean on the need for policy change is well intentioned but ultimately it leaves power in the hands of others. Women don’t need permission to breastfeed. We just need to do it. In public, for at least the amount of time that is biologically sound, in spite of jobs or unsupportive partners or mothers in law. Just do it. Do it and your children will see what is normal. Do it and actually commit and companies will eventually have to further shift those policies as a result of the natural demands of the nursing mother and her baby. Do it and partners will see the needs of the dyad and step up to provide more. Do it and men won’t sexualize it the way they do now (at least not to the extent that they do now-I’m willing to be lactation fetishes do not exist in tribal cultures). Do it and other women will see you doing it and feel it is possible for them. Defiant alignment with physiology is what women need, and it is what will shift culture. Then we can fuss with policy.
Yeeeeeees! I absolutely agree. This is how we change the world. Just live it out, baby!
I could not agree more. I joke that other than my husband, no one has seen me nurse more than my coworkers, ha!
The start of breastfeeding both of my kids was one of the hardest things I've done and I'm so glad I fought for it. I also had to use nipple shields at the beginning for both and it's really what allowed us to start breastfeeding on the right foot. A lot of it is anatomical-- their mouths are so little & some babies need that extra aid! I went on to nurse my oldest 1.5 years and my youngest 2 years.
Thx for sharing❤️ Hard doesn’t necessarily mean bad and I think we need to embrace that truth more!
(But also, breastfeeding should not be as hard as it is. It’s made harder by so many things that don’t have to be)
I worked really, really hard to nurse my tongue-tied babies and exclusively pumped, every 2 hours, for 24 hours, for 2 months until they latched. I then nursed for a year before I decided to wean. I enjoyed breastfeeding but I don't know if it's the end-all-be-all. I also don't expect everyone to have the support necessary to pump the way I did and work on the latch etc. It was truly a full time job and then some.
I like Emily Oster's books and her point that the health benefits to breastfeeding are pretty limited to newborn phase to the start of solids or so makes a lot of sense. And of course before formula, women gave babies goat's milks, cow's milk, sheep's milk etc in a supplementary fashion quite often. So the best 'reason' to continue long term breastfeeding is because the mom likes it. If she does, great, breastfeed forever with all the support you need! But it's probably different for every Mom. I was VERY over it by a year and much happier when I weaned. If we have another I think I probably will nurse for less time, but we'll see.
I think an added issue for me was that I came into breastfeeding thinking of it as something I HAD to do as a requirement of motherhood. My Mom wrote a book about breastfeeding, one of the first to really advocate for it, back in the early 90s. She was an executive and rallying for working Moms to be able to nurse. She was a superhero for that and it's awesome. But it became like a religion to her and I *do* think she got very judgy about women not breastfeeding. So it was hard for me to see options around feeding a baby because my own mother made it seem so intensely necessary to breastfeed.
I'm proud of what I did to be able to nurse my babies and I tell all my friends I WILL come to your house anytime of day or night and help you with the latch or anything at all. It's beautiful to feel capable and strong in our bodies, but I do agree with the article you shared that 'maternal well being' is more important than any one of these parenting decisions - breastfeeding, co-sleeping (which I also hated beyond newborn phase and my Mom loved well into little kid life), etc, etc. Dr. Sears completely ruined my life as a first time Mom and when I stopped following attachment parenting "style" I became a happy, joyful Mom again. I actually didn't follow any 'style' - I just did what was right for me and my baby at the time and life went on.
Studies show that trauma around birth etc has less to do with what actually happened in any given birth and more the idea that you had AGENCY to make informed choices. Many women do feel empowered after c-sections, inductions, etc. If they are fully informed, knowledgable, and feel they are respected. I had two inductions (I had GD) and two very different experiences. The first go round I felt out of my head scared and confused and overmedicated and it's a miracle things didn't end in a c section. The second time I knew what was coming and I felt strong, in control, and proud when they put my baby on my chest. It had gone SO WELL!
I also unfortunately think mothers are some of the most judgmental people. And it makes sense why. Mothers make immense sacrifices for their kids and they want validation for their choices. It can be confusing when someone makes an obviously different choice for their kids because people start questioning themselves... really? I thought this was the only way? I wish it wasn't like this, but it is.
I never felt odd about nursing out and about and I applaud and encourage all women to breastfeed wherever they like. As the Pope said, if the baby is hungry, nurse them! But I know people feel differently about this.
I think generally it's less about normalizing breastfeeding - one aspect of motherhood - and more that we just need to normalize women and baby out and about living life together - nursing, bottle feeding, crying, carrying, wearing, stroller walking - just the whole 9 yards. Family life is very hidden generally and we need to let that chaos loose into the world culture of life style.
Hi Katie! Oh my goodness - so much work you did! I did the same (exclusively pumped) for my first, but just for a week or so! And it was SO MUCH. Oof. Kudos to you. I've never had a tie with any of my babies but I've heard that can be so hard.
You know, I read Emily Oster's first book and loved it. I haven't read any others, but I will say I've sensed a shift in her work just from following her a bit on social media. It seems she's much more, shall we say, mainstream in her positions now, where as her first book (Expecting Better) was really about pushing against mainstream recommendations in pregnancy. An interesting voice for sure.
Thanks for sharing about your mom and how all that impacted you. What groundbreaking work your mom was doing in the 90s!
As for the NYT piece/ maternal well-being vs. parenting choices, I see a lot to unpack there. I also didn't co-sleep much past age 1 (I like my bed to myself), and I also don't consider myself an "attachment parent." I absolutely agree that what makes a good birth is the woman's experience of and agency in that birth, not the specifics of how it happened: I actually wrote a post saying just that on my old blog (didn't actually know there was research behind it!).
I think I'd say that mothers are the most defensive, not the most judgmental (for the same reasons you mentioned).
I'm glad you never felt uncomfortable nursing in public. That's awesome. Unfortunetly, most women don't feel that way, which is upsetting to me. When I see a mother trying to latch her baby under a cover (especially when she pulls it up over her head, which I know is just a logistical thing but which feels symbolic) I get close to enraged. Not at the woman, of course, but at a culture that loves boobs out except when they're doing the thing they were literally made for, and that the vibe is such that a newly postpartum mother - whom we should all be revering and catering to - has to fight with a piece of cloth to feed her baby. Even the nursing rooms that are like sad little closets bother me (the swanky ones are fine, ha). I'd much rather live in a world where mothers just fed their babies wherever, whenever, and no one thought a thing of it. Or bottle-feeding or doing any number of care tasks, as you mentioned. (Agree totally with your last sentence!)
In sum, I'm not one to lift up breastfeeding in some sort of all-or-nothing, moralistic, religious way. But I do see a need to advocate for it as the biological norm that is good for both babies and mothers.
I think we need to ask ourselves why breastfeeding has become optional though. It is only via formula marketing and women being taken out of the home in order to bolster the market as taxpayers (rather than working in home with children underfoot to bolster the FAMILY economy) that it has become so. We are mammals. Birthing a baby is followed by nursing a baby. The fact that we hem and haw over studies and statistics about the thing that literally carried our species to survival is laughable. We all need to remember that we are animals with instincts.
Say it louder for the people in the back 👏🏽we overthink EVERYTHING… to our (and more importantly, our babies) detriment, unfortunately.
I too felt completely comfortable nursing in public. And it’s funny - before I had my first, I thought I would be shy about it, but nope. It felt so natural to me that I never thought twice about it. I nursed in church, in airports, in restaurants…pretty much anywhere.
I love that and I was the same (felt pretty comfortable and if people felt uncomfortable that was 100% their problem not mine). As Emily Hancock wrote in her comment, I think that's one of the biggest things we can do to change things: just doing it. No big deal.
I've breasfed three kids, exclusively pumped for one, donated milk to a local NICU and shared some with a friend who needed it. Through all of that, there was incredibly little support for me as a woman with oversupply. It's the reason I exclusively pumped with my first, and it was the cause of my 5 bouts with mastitis. Weaning was awful. It's like they teach medical professionals that every single woman has low supply, and then when you don't they look at you like, "So what's the problem, you have enough milk." I wish I could go back and educate myself before having my first, because I'm positive that with what I know now, I could have successfully nursed her like the others.
Totally agree. I get all kinds of sympathy as a woman with primary low supply but if you oversupply, it’s like you’re a show off.
Hey lady! Ugh. I do think it's actually quite complex and can very so much woman to woman and (like I said in one of the points) not all support is actually supportive. Kudos to you for figuring it out and for all you had to do and go through. I see you!
Yes I totally agree! I meant to be standing in solidarity with you about the poor support in place for postpartum mamas in pretty much every area, breastfeeding included.
Every dang word! Thank you so much for this brilliant piece searing with needed clarity. Like you, I have really loved nursing. With all four of my babies the journey has been different. I never once felt judged for giving my babes formula when they had it. Where I did feel judged was when I shared how hard I worked to make nursing happen or how proud I was of being able to do it.
Thank you friend for your kind words and for sharing your experiences. I think any judgment or defensiveness people feel about using formula is actually deep frustration, shame, and/or grief (and I'm happy you didn't feel any). I used formula for a bit with my first and I'm going to try to dig back into my memory and write about that. I remember it all so clearly and it makes me teary to this day (the whole experience of learning to breastfeed for the first time, not just the use of formula).
I've had a wide spectrum of birth experiences (C-section, 2 hospital VBACs, and a home birth where my midwife did not arrive in time for the birth). My main reaction after reading that NYT article was sadness. I don't mean to sound condescending, but I do feel bad for this woman. Her conclusions sound like someone scoffing at the idea of having sex because they've had sperm technologically implanted in their uterus and it's basically the same.
I can only speak from my set of experiences. In my case, after my birth with just my husband, we both agreed that absolutely nothing from our three previous hospital births had come close to preparing us for what it felt like to bring our child into the world together at home. It was a qualitatively different experience altogether.
We all seem to understand mourning infertility and how devastating it is when our bodies seem to betray our natural ability to reproduce. So why can we not extend that to other areas of the reproductive cycle? Just as it can be devastating and grief-inducing not to be able to naturally conceive, it can be devastating and grief-inducing not to bring a conceived baby into the world in the way our bodies were designed to birth. What measure of healing for mothers and babies might happen if we welcomed that grief instead of insisting that things like surgical birth and having to feed our babies formula are really not a big deal?
I find this conversation so interesting, mostly because it hasn't changed that much in the 25-26 years or so that I've been paying attention. Anecdotally, I didn't get off to a great start breastfeeding my first, so his early months were a pretty stressful combination of pumping/bottlefeeding breastmilk and formula feeding, with a short window of successful nursing at the breast before he wound up exclusively bottlefed at around 6 months. There were so many ways our breastfeeding efforts were sabotaged in the beginning and it makes me sad because I wanted it to work so much.
My next four (all born out of hospital) were exclusively breastfed from the start, and all of them nursed well past two. I think I breastfed a combined total of about ten years, and I vastly preferred breastfeeding to bottle...once I had it all figured out, AND once I got past the early stages of nipple soreness which for me was really nothing like "soreness" and more like "excruciating pain" (nothing like hearing that if it hurts you're doing it wrong over and over, only to learn that for some women that's just the reality of the early experience...)
When comparing my kids, one thing I don't think gets talked about enough is the dental/orthodontic benefits. Only one of my younger four got braces, and they came off really fast, whereas my eldest had a very narrow jaw and jacked up front teeth. Coincidence or cause, I really can't say for sure, but I don't know that the orthodontic benefits of breastfeeding get as much attention as they should. (Also this may be more due to the delivery method - my oldest had bottles consistently from birth and took a pacifier, while my younger four almost never had bottles and wouldn't take pacis). But I find it an interesting anecdotal observation and worth noting for parents weighing the options. Braces are expensive, yo.
I had pretty strong feelings about breastfeeding as a young mom, which mellowed over time as I became more confident in my choices (I agree with you that most of what appears to be judgment is often defensiveness, Amber.) These days I truly don't care how anyone feeds her baby - it's just not my business. Still, I have never loved "fed is best" as a slogan - like you, to me it comes off as condescending, and also, it's just not accurate based on the data we have. Formula can be a useful tool or even a lifesaving alternative when breastmilk isn't available, but I don't think it actually does anyone any favors to try to save feelings by altering facts. Women are smarter than that.
Anyway, thanks for this thoughtful post! As someone who had much better birth experiences out of hospital than in and worked in a midwife-run, freestanding birth center in the early 00s, I can't bring myself to read the NYT article - sounds like the same lack of critical thinking and junk "journalism" that's been plaguing the woman-centered birth movement since I had my first home birth 24 years ago. If anything it's possibly gotten worse.
This was really interesting and informative! I am fairly new to living in Norway (I emigrated from the US), where I am about to have my first baby this fall. From what I understand, breastfeeding is the norm here with close to 80% of women breastfeeding exclusively for the 6 months. Because healthcare is administered by the state some people do feel a bit weird about midwives and public health nurses pushing breastfeeding as if it is a blanket a public health policy and not an individualized or sacred thing, but also nothing is really forced on you and there are a lot of classes and support for it. When I am back in the US, I do hear many yuppie friends talk about breastfeeding as if it is a hippie or overachiever thing, where it seems like just the standard in Norway.
I will say having been in the alternative medicine world (I went to acupuncture school in the US) there do exist plenty of people on their high horse about natural medicine (and do think people who use any kind of modern medical intervention are weak or inferior), so I don't think people are completely making it up that there are judgemental people out there. But I think being judged by a really small subculture of people really is secondary to being able to make the best decisions for yourself given your set of circumstances. Not all of us have the same range of options and some people really do have medical conditions which limit their choices (whether it comes to breastfeeding or a low intervention birth), but that shouldn't stop women who do have more options from considering them and talking about which of those options is best for them.
Thank you for sharing what you've seen in Norway vs. here! Super interesting (and totally tracks - the hippie/overachiever thing! That's spot on).
I agree with you that some are truly judgmental (I think I mentioned that super briefly). I was deep in crunchy culture for a while and I'm happy to be out. It definitely can get unhealthy!
Yeah, unfortunately I think the extremes of over-medicalization of pregnancy in the uS feeds a subculture of people that are hostile to anything medical as a reaction.
But I don't think that should detract from the larger point you make here, which is just because a minority of women can't breastfeed, doesn't mean we can't talk about the benefits of breastfeeding, or that it it's offensive to say that it's more desirable to have a culture that supports and celebrates breastfeeding because some women will feel left out.
After reading the NYT piece that you linked, I personally think this is just the right amount of sass— that article is so irritating and misleading (fortunately there are a fair amount of people piping up in protest in that article’s comment section) and I do think folks need to read that article in conjuction with this piece to better understand your tone and reasoning for conflating birth and breastfeeding.
Birth and breastfeeding are touchy topics; they’re deeply personal and also universal in motherhood and it’s really hard to write about them. I think you have done a good job navigating that touchiness and clarifying your stance, and with great kindness. I appreciate what you said in one of these comments regarding people > ideas, that is something I will remember and hold close as I write and explore these topics as well.
Mm thanks so much. It’s very true that I was in a certain energetic space after reading that, and I basically wrote this in response. Thank you for seeing that and for letting me know your thoughts. And yes I did see a lot of people pushing back in the comments when I gave them a quick glance, which is great.
The narratives represented in that essay, which I believe stem from both grief and a subconscious desire to not be a woman who gets “too into” motherhood, are so pervasive and so influential. Unfortunately, the only other strong ideas about motherhood come from (Protestant) Christian culture and those have been lacking as well. I think we desperately need fresh ideas about motherhood, and I’m trying to someone bringing them forward. I see many others doing this as well. (You included!)
Thank you again for taking the time to leave these thoughts.
*trying to be someone
Thank you for being brave and writing this post, Am ber! I love that it has prompted so many thoughtful comments from people which hopefully all lead to fruitful contemplation and further discussion for women in their own communities!
I have heard that so many people have had such condescending experiences with lactation consultants and that makes me so sad. My experience with them at the hospital was SO validating and I am so grateful. (At one point while I wept, one of them assured me that every other mom in the postpartum wing was also struggling). They even have a line you can call every day of the week just to ask questions and get additional support. It is amazing, and it’s due to their support that I felt like I COULD do it. I triple fed for 2+ weeks at the beginning and they all even acknowledged how unsustainable it was. I am so grateful I did it though and that eventually both baby and I were able to figure it out. That being said, I can’t imagine having to have had to triple feed much longer. And even though breastfeeding is going pretty well, it’s been 4 months and there’s still times she screams so much and refuses to latch and it’s so hard. An hour ago actually 🫠
I’m grateful for everyone who commented and shared their differing experiences. I feel inspired to be a very intentional communal support for my mom friends having babies very soon.
Love all this so much! Thank you for your words and for sharing your experiences. It’s so interesting, so many people having bad experiences w lactation consultants (myself included). What is with that? Genuinely curious. So glad you were so supported, and yes, it can still be hard even with support. It’s such a beautiful thing to fight for though. AND it’s also okay to use some formula if it’s necessary (was just chatting with a friend tonight who recently started supplementing).
I’m so happy you feel excited/prepared to be a resource for other women. I think that’s really how we do it, that’s how we change things for the better for mothers. Writing sassy articles on the Internet isn’t gonna do it;)
I meant to add in my original comment, I also used a nipple shield!
I’m surprised at the number of women here who have used one! I think the lactation community should take note and stop demonizing them! Was yours supportive of it? Mine were not. I’d read about them myself and had my husband run to the store to get some. I tried and it immediately worked, and I remember clearly the feeling of overwhelming joy.
Wow yes they are the ones who gave it to me, especially because I was having pain initially/flat nipples. At a later appointment, after I had been home a week or so, whoever I met with (I saw multiple different consultants from the hospital) suggested I try latching her without it because she would be able to transfer more milk without it which turned out to be true. Not sure how that particular consultant would’ve responded if I desired to continue with a nipple shield/continued to have pain though.
That feeling of overwhelming joy when you can hear them finally gulping after so much struggle is so real 🥹
Wow sorry for the terrible grammar; it’s late!😅