Rage mode: ENGAGED!

Now, I know “opinion pieces” aren’trealnews, but this is on the Guardian website, where it could easily be mistaken for something of influence.

But is breastfeeding far and away the best thing? Or have we done women a disservice by overstating its benefits? This week one of the leading figures in a backlash against breastfeeding will argue in an open lecture at the University of Kent, Canterbury, that “the scientific evidence for breastfeeding’s health benefits is weak”. 

This whole article, this whole lecture at the University of Kent, in fact by me even posting this, is all simply to fuel sales for this woman’s book. 

The article is worth reading, because I always find Mondays more tolerable when I get my heckles up first thing in the morning, rather than waiting until just after lunch, like on normal days.

Dr Nancy Butte, professor of paediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, and an authority on childhood obesity, has said that it’s “hard to distinguish between a well-cared-for bottle-fed infant and one who’s breastfed”.

 Note that the level of care for the breast-fed baby isn’t stated. So, you have to make up for the shortcoming of formula in other ways, to reach the baseline standard achieved via breastfeeding? Is that what you’re implying? Because that’s what I’m reading.

One of the greatest lies promoted by breastfeeding advocates is that breastfeeding is free. But it’s not free if you count mother’s labour.

 For this argument to work, one would have to assume that the process of

• sterilising bottles,
• measuring exact quantities of formula,
• mixing and heating formula at the precise moment that it’s needed,
• returning all the bottles to the steriliser

all somehow count as negative labour/effort. Then, maybe, if you also dicount the fact that formula costs money…then we’re maybe eeking towards the notion that breastfeeding isn’t free, in both effort and financial senses. But only if we ignore all of that.

She admits the response to her book has been “mostly negative”. One blogger writes: “It bespeaks great scientific arrogance (of the kind that Wolf supposedly decries!) to maintain that an artificial formula could offer absolutely every crucial natural constituent of mother’s milk.” But others have applauded her for “bringing sunlight to this topic” and opposing the “breastfeeding mafia”.

I’m going to stop there, lest I rage out and burst a blood vessel. Fundamentally if you can read that article and not find a million things wrong with it, you’re in the wrong.