Zeno's Bar & Grill

A controversial new public health push for increased breast feeding is taking things to a whole new level of guilt for non-breastfeeding mothers, according to an article in yesterday’s NY Times (“Breast Feed or Else”, by Roni Rabin.)

The admirable goal of this effort is to raise the numbers of mothers who nurse their babies. However, it’s not clear to us that the moms who choose not to breast feed are doing so because they lack information on the benefits of nursing. Certainly this new public health effort is going to make things more stressful for anyone who formula feeds by choice or necessity.

According to the article, there’s even a senator who has proposed requiring warning labels on cans of formula, similar to those on packages of cigarettes. There’s also an especially infuriating quote from a scientific adviser to the Office of Women’s Health in the Department of Health and Human Services, that compares not breastfeeding to smoking during pregnancy.

Apparently the Ad Council also came up with ads showing pregnant women doing things like log rolling and riding mechanical bulls to suggest that not breastfeeding after birth is a bad thing. The tag line was, "You wouldn't take risks before your baby's born. Why start after?" To our knowledge, those ads were pulled.

We’ve pointed this out before, but geez, so many of us in our generation were formula fed and still managed to turn out okay. Couldn’t we lighten up a little?

--Melanie & Kelly

P.S. Disclaimer: we both nursed our kids for eons, so you know this isn't just a knee-jerk defensive reaction based on personal choice.