Quantcast
Channel: Letters to the Editor » Education
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 10

Prescription for new mothers, healthy babies

0
0

MCT illustration

SANTA ANA, Christine Betzold, president Orange County Breastfeeding Coalition; associate clinical professor, Pediatrics Department, UCI:  Mothers such as Nara Schoenberg who wrote the article, “Some breast-feeding claims challenged” [Life/Wellness, Jan. 10], often share their heartbreaking stories with lactation consultants about the inability to breastfeed.

Mothers feel guilty even when things happen that are beyond their control. Helping mothers move forward, accept loss and learn from the experience is one of our great challenges. Without help, some try to cope by using denial or making excuses as this article tries to do.

Often, professionals are not taught how to know if a breastfeeding study is good or bad.

Poor studies place mothers into a breastfeeding group even when breastfeeding their children 10 percent of the time and formula feeding them the rest of the time. These studies compare this group to groups of women that formula feed 100 percent of the time. When mothers that breastfeed 100 percent of the time are compared to those who don’t breastfeed or formula feed 100 percent of the time the studies usually prove breastfeeding to be better.

The Promotion of Breastfeeding Intervention Trial by Phyllis L.F. Rippeyong and Mary Noonan, published in the American Sociological Review cited by the above article did not study breastfeeding vs. bottle-feeding; it studied two breastfeeding groups. The difference was that one group delivered at a hospital that provides special care to help mothers breastfeed (i.e. a “baby-friendly” hospital like St. Joseph’s) and the other group at a hospital that does not provide this care.

Babies delivered at “baby-friendly” hospitals were healthier. Indeed, they were 40 percent less likely to get the stomach flu. Next while the “longer breastfeeders” did make less, their husbands made more. When husbands make more, moms can work less and their longer durations may have been the result of working less, not the cause of working less.

Finally, “some of the weakest claims about breast-feeding” do not matter given the $13 billion and the 900-plus lives lost when 90 percent of infants are not exclusively breastfed for six months. When benefits are stated in terms of the cost of treating illness and the number of lives lost, the question of whether feeding choices change income, weight and IQ become unimportant. Do you really think that a mother dying of breast cancer or mourning the loss of a baby from SIDS, cares about lost wages, pounds or IQ points? If not, then shouldn’t we stop downplaying the benefits of breastfeeding and focus on preventing disease and death by providing truthful information about breastfeeding while working to remove the many barriers mothers meet?

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER @OCRegLetters

CLICK HERE FOR OUR WRITING TIPS ARCHIVE

WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Letters to the Editor: E-mail to letters@ocregister.com. Please provide your name, city and telephone number (telephone numbers will not be published). Letters of about 200 words or videos of 30-seconds each will be given preference. Letters will be edited for length, grammar and clarity.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 10

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images