Changing the 'breast is best' slogan won't improve breastfeeding rates
01 July 2010
Lesley Backhouse, chairman of The Breastfeeding Network is blaming the 'breast is best slogan' for the fact that so few mothers in Britain breastfeed their babies. I am really amazed if she seriously thinks that women don't bother to breastfeed simply because they are unaware of the health benefits and think it is more normal to bottle feed.
All the mothers I see are desperate to breastfeed and will (and do) continue to breastfeed once they are shown how to do it correctly. Every mother I have seen this week has felt very upset by the lack of help available to them when they had experienced problems and were all scathing about the suggestion that changing the slogan would have made any difference to them.
Take for example, Mary who had an eight-day-old baby that she couldn't get to latch on to the breast. At least nine midwives in the hospital had tried and failed to get her baby to latch on. The hospital then sent one of their breastfeeding specialist midwives to visit her at home - but the midwife chose to visit at a time when the mother had already said her baby would be asleep and not ready to feed. As a result, she, too, was unable to latch the baby on but she did not offer any constructive advice and then sat down to fill in the paperwork to say that she had visited. She did not offer to visit again. Mary told me that "she seemed to be more interested in ticking boxes than actually helping me".
It took me less than two minutes to latch the baby on and then not much longer to teach Mary to do it. The following day Mary left a message on my answerphone to say that feeding was still going brilliantly and that her baby had needed no further bottles of either breast milk or formula. Job done!
On 22 June I wrote a letter to the Daily Mail expressing my views on the subject. When the letter was published on 25 June, I was horrified to see that they had changed and edited some of the content - including printing it under the headline "when bottle is best". This made it look as though I was saying that it is better to bottle feed than to breastfeed, which is most definitely not what I was saying. Below is the full letter that I sent in:
Changing slogans won't improve breastfeeding rates. Lesley Backhouse, chairman of The Breastfeeding Network (Mail) is naive in the extreme if she thinks that the Breast-is-Best slogan is "harming the cause". The reality is that approximately 50% of mothers give up breastfeeding because they find it too painful or difficult. They do not give up breastfeeding because they are unaware of the benefits and I would imagine that most of these mothers (who are already feeling a failure) will be outraged at the suggestion that they gave up simply because the breast-is-best slogan did not encourage them enough.
If Lesley were to speak to these mothers, I think she would hear that the main reason they give up is because they cannot find anyone to help them resolve their breastfeeding problems. If they could find expert help (that actually works!) these mothers would carry on breastfeeding. But the reality is that many of them are told that it is normal to get sore nipples, that it is normal for a breastfed baby to need to feed up to 20 times a day and that every mother has enough milk - none of this is of much help to a mother who is in agony at every feed and whose baby won't stop crying because he's hungry.
When breastfeeding goes well it is a wonderful experience for both mother and baby and all mothers should be encouraged to give it a go. But it is unrealistic to expect more mothers to breastfeed whilst the perception (and sometimes the reality) remains that breastfeeding is more difficult than bottlefeeding.
I am hoping that the Daily Mail will publish an apology so that anyone who read my letter on 25th of June will get to see what I actually wrote. But in case they don't, I do hope that this blog will be noticed by at least some of the people!