The "Baby friendly v. Anti-mom" Hospital Debate is Complete Bullshit
It's unacceptable that women are being driven to this.
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You may have seen the newest viral video all the birth nerds, lactivists, and mainstream 'mamas are chattering about. Itās an Ob-Gyn enumerating the ways baby friendly hospitals are āanti-mom.ā She mentions a story about woman being pumped by a nurse while unconscious in the ICU, exhausted moms wanting to sleep after days of pushing and lactation specialist bursting in with a lectures, etc.
The comments echo the sentiments of New York Timeās article, that paints baby friendly hospitals and lactation professionals as pushy, ignorant of mothersā needs and even cruel.Ā
Hereās something to ponder: why, if after years of dreaming of being a mother, nine long months of gestation, the baby shower, the registry, and however strenuous the labor, these mothers want to be AWAY from their babies. Why are they lamenting that they canāt get a ābreakā when the kid isnāt even 3 hours old??
What is happening here?
Itās a pretty fascinating move by the OBGYN (and gross and wrong) to pit mom against baby and dyad against the lactation counselor. But it is also perfectly emblematic of the real problem. When you read the comments itās, ummm pretty clear who the culprit is behind these HORRENDOUS experiences:
Comment after comment or harrowing, barbaric, ghastly birth stories and trauma.Ā Unnecessary inductions, forced to labor on your back, sepsis, infections, unnecessary cesareans resulting in hemorrhaging, and the destruction of the critical, precious, golden hour women deserve.
LADIES, THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!!
THE PROBLEM IS THE HOSPITAL WHICH FUNCTIONS AS A PROFIT CENTER AND DEHUMANIZES EVERYONE INVOLVED!!
ITāS NOT THE BREASTFEEDING!!
Ok??? ā¦.*exhales RAGEFULY*
Letās start here:
The Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative is About Protecting Moms & Babies from Corporate Greed
UNICEF and WHO launched the the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative in 1991 in an attempt to break the chokehold formula companies had on the maternity wards around the world. Mothers were being sent home with formula samples (their form of āadvertisingā), formula companies built entire nurseries in the hospital (separation between mom and baby means lower breastfeeding rates), and most infamously, formula consultants dressed up as nurses in developing countries to push their products on new moms with deadly results.Ā
Baby friendly hospitals follow a 10 step checklist āwhich includes things like skin to skin time after delivery, no formula unless medically necessary, education for staff and patients about the benefits of breastfeeding, the banishment of nurseries so the mother and baby can room together, and also the discouraging pacifiersāin order to keep the recovery room free of commercial interests and put the focus back on nourishing the dyad.
These are all researched backed strategies to increase breastfeeding rates and they work. American mothers have close to an 80% breastfeeding initiation rate but then plummet like a bag of bricks off a building down to less 25%.
Why?
Well, let me ask you:
Can any initiative be truly dyad friendly inside a hospital?
Hereās one of the main problems: baby friendly hospitals are a bubble that denies the larger context of how:
mothers are treated inside of hospitals
breastfeeding is regarded outside outside of the hospital.
In a sense, this baby friendly initiatives are like teaching a person everything they need to know about how to fish then sending them away without a fishing pole. Oh, and doing all of this after theyāve been attacked by a shark.Ā
The shark, in this case, is the obstetric industrial complex.Ā
To the first point: birth is not a medical crisis, it is not an illness, and it is not inherently dangerous. Yet 1 in 3 women come out of the birthing process traumatized.
In 2021, the maternal mortality rate jumped to 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with a rate of 23.8 in 2020 and 20.1 in 2019.
On average for black women, itās more than twice that number.Ā
Is this appalling statistic due to uh, all the home-birthing thatās happening in the United States??
Doctors and OBGYNs lament online about the āfreebirthā movement and the ādangerous misinformationā that people like doulas and birth educators give out but thatās the natural result of women wanting to escape the system thatās leaving them traumatized and abused.
Medical professionals will paint themselves as saviors for women experiencing complications that THEY THEMSELVES caused.
And where do these āinterventionsā and ābest practicesā come from? An environment dominated by men, commercial interests, insurance companies, and corporations trying to mitigate risk and maximize profit.
Why is a nurse pumping an unconscious woman in the ICU? Because sheās still a wage worker who could be fired for not following established protocol. Hospitals are run like Taco Bells. Beds need to be cleared asap to get the next patient in. Labor is just another commodity that costs money. Everything else thatās happened in the delivery ward up until that point hasnāt been dyad centered so why start now?
To the second point about culture: Americans treat breastfeeding as merely another choice, a choice that values connivence overall other factors. Itās given all the weight of choosing paper or plastic at the grocery store. And to āpressureā women one way or another is wrong.
Unless we, as a culture, make serious changes to support mothers and prioritize the precious postpartum period, the āfed is bestā mantra will always be the easiest way to wave away breastfeeding benefits.
There are not ātwo-sidesā to this debate
I consider myself to be someone who genuinely considers both viewpoints of an argumentā but framing what happens in hospitals as ābaby-friendly vs. anti-momā is a false dichotomy that further perpetuates a very real problem. Itās glaringly obvious that treating pregnancy and birth as a medical crisis results in unnecessary interventions that negatively impacts mothers, babies and society at large.Ā
Demonizing breastfeeding, baby friendly initiatives, and lactation professionals as evil, pushy, and with a nefarious agenda does nothing to improve mother and infant health. It only serves to let larger, corrupt systems off the hook when it comes to ACTUALLY SUPPORTING the dyad.
The desire new mothers have to be away from their babies during this precious time is not natural. Itās not normal. And itās unacceptable that mothers are being driven to this.Ā
This is all totally on point. I actually worked in the MIC in a public hospital at the time it was pursuing Baby Friendly status. We all had (midwives, nurses, OBs) had to be prepped to be interviewed and "tested" (though not all of us were). I remember studying the "acceptable" answers to many of the questions about breast/chest feeding and being completely stymied by some of them, as someone who at that point had nursed 3 babies for a cumulative 9 years and had helped many others also nurse. It really struck me how much is lost when ways of knowing that have traditionally been passed down by lived community becomes "systematized" (and mechanized, essentially). It was really distressing and depressing. This false dichotomy that has been created in the wake of that is equally distressing and depressing. Believing my needs and my babies needs are at odds turns a profit (in birth by allowing obstetric management that is the most expensive in the world, and in postpartum by leaving mothers endlessly spending money on chasing their "former selves" and by forcing them back to work too soon) . Capitalism thrives on this narrative and so it is heavily, heavily pushed. What's sad is people do the work of our overlords for them by internalizing, naturalizing, and then we are all just trapped in this hegemony. :(
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