Mothers and Others Harassing Breast Cancer Survivor Mothers For Not Breast Feeding
There are times I am glad I never had children. When I see articles like these, it makes me feel better. I don’t have to put up with this nonsense.
People not only judge you for NOT having children, they judge you on WHEN you have them (that is, at what age you have them), HOW MANY kids you have, HOW you have them (C-section or “natural birth” etc), and HOW you raise them.
No effing thank you to all that.
I cannot figure out why so many people find it necessary or acceptable to run up to another woman and tell her when, if, how to have children and at what age and so on, and if, when, and how a mother should bottle feed or breast feed.
First spotted these stories on STFU Parents Twitter:
1. (Link): Why I Don’t Breastfeed, If You Must Know
2. (Link): ‘My husband calls them breast-feeding bullies’
Excerpts from “My husband calls them breast-feeding bullies”
- By Emily Wax-Thibodeaux
- Women say they are asked if they breast-feed by cabdrivers they never met before. They are asked, by homeless people on the street, if they will have a “natural birth.”
Women also wrote in that they were judged for being too small during pregnancy or too big, for eating sushi or for drinking coffee. Some spoke of the “judge-y moms club,” just waiting to bust a non-natural birthing, formula feeding, co-sleeping criminal.
When it comes to being pregnant, giving birth and child rearing — “you are crazy to co-sleep with your newborn/you are crazy if you don’t co-sleep” — it seems like the personal is both political and public.
Thousands of readers responded through e-mails and social media to the essay I wrote, “Why I don’t breast-feed, if you must know.”
Much of the reader response seemed to be frustration over the rigidity and aggression of lactation consultants, who are seen as pushing breastfeeding by any means necessary. Maybe that’s because they used to be the ones who were mocked as crunchy earth mothers in the 1970s and told they could not breastfeed in public. Their message that breastfeeding was natural was and is important but perhaps they have overdone it lately.
- I wrote the story for our health section because as a young breast cancer survivor, I waited nearly seven years and fought really hard — jumping into the emotionally and financially draining IVF process — to have a child, and it was maddening that, during such a happy and triumphant time, I felt I had to explain (to those whom many readers called “the lactation police”) about why I didn’t breast-feed.
- ….One reader named Colleen wrote that she was shopping for formula in Wegmans, and “some lady came up to me and said, ‘I can’t believe you’d even consider putting that poison into your child’s body.’ “
Christian Pundit 