I had a very mixed reaction to reading the article in the Post. On the one hand, I am disgusted that formula companies might try to tone down a public health campaign that they feel would be detrimental to their business. The degree to which business seems to control the political process is extremely worrying.

On the other hand, I grow weary of all sorts of people telling me how I should raise my child and what decisions are best, when so much of parenting is a negotiation between the needs of the child and the parents, which are so particular. There are so many messages that make the already fraught labyrinth of parenting choices even more anxiety inducing: Play Mozart so they’ll be smart! Banish the television! Feed them only organic vegetables! Get them on a schedule right away! Start them on an instrument at age four! All of this blaring in insistent capital letters from the moment your belly overtakes your boobs.

I also must confess myself weary of “the sky is falling!” style of health advertising. I am not an expert on how to get people to change their behavior, but I do know that I tend to tune out what I perceive to be hysterical messages. I have no idea whether there is a link between not being breast fed and getting diabetes later in life. I do not think that formula companies have any right to suppress that message if it’s true, but it seems like a larger context for such a claim makes it much more believable and also more likely to change people’s behavior.

When I think back to deciding to nurse my son, I have to admit that there wasn’t much of a process for me. What an innocent--I just thought nursing was normal. I remember my mom nursing my younger sister and also learning in my high school health class that breast-fed babies tend to have better immune systems. What if a perception of what’s “normal” is the basis on which the decision to breast- or bottle-feed is made? And if so, wouldn’t a campaign about the “epidemic” of not breast feeding be counter productive?

Finally, it seems like a lot of advocates can’t quote the statistic about European women breastfeeding more than American women often enough. Do they think that by just telling all of us to nurse we will? My problem with this approach is that it fails to take into account other factors that influence a woman’s ability to nurse. We have really short maternity leaves compared with most of Europe, and pumping can be a pain in the neck. Even if a woman decides to pump, she might need to convince her employer to set up a special room for that purpose. And our insurance companies can be incredibly stingy when it comes to services like a lactation consultant when breastfeeding is proving difficult. These factors are largely outside of any individual woman’s control, but they have to be addressed if nursing rates in this country are going to increase.

There are several articles now that address the health ads they intended to run. A group known as stats.org picked up the NY Times story about these health ads and there is more than one side to the story. Stats is a non-profit organization that serves as a sort of watchdog for the way the media uses science and statistics in their reporting.
According to Stats and another paper in the Duke Policy and Law Journal, the sky is not falling. Honestly, I am not an advocate either way but I am deeply disturbed by what these scientists have found. What is worse is these women who reviewed the science reported by the AAP as the evidence for these claims were accused of being "failed" breastfeeders by advocates of breastfeeding. As it turns out all three women breastfed their children. The link to the paper is below.

http://www.stats.org/stories/breast_feed_nyt_jun_20_06.htm