When I was pregnant with my first son, I gave myself permission to eat as much as I wanted. On some level I decided "you're eating for two now" could reasonably be interpreted as "you're eating for twelve now." Having had a long history of binge eating and binge dieting, being pregnant gave me a margin of error I had never allowed myself (if you have ever weighed yourself before getting in the shower because dry hair is lighter than wet hair, you know what I mean). By the time I was ready to give birth, I had justified my way to a 50 pound weight gain. I consoled myself with the prospect of the sudden weight loss giving birth would bring. The average baby weighs about 8 pounds, I figured, and the placenta and assorted fluids had to weigh another 4 or 5 (yes, I looked up the weight of the average placenta) so in just a few hours I would take off at least 12 pounds. Cool. But then I would still be 35 pounds overweight. I panicked. Then I read that breastfeeding burns calories. Yes! I knew I would breastfeed – had never considered not breastfeeding. Now, breastfeeding came with weight loss benefits. Yay and pass the Doritos.
I knew exactly how much I weighed the day I gave birth. I know this because I made a point of weighing myself before leaving the apartment for the hospital. I don't remember the number now – I've had therapy – but even in hard labor, I was thinking about getting thin. I didn't get back on that scale for five days. The birthing center "squat and leave" birth I had planned became a cesarean section, a post-operative infection, and aspiration pneumonia. My new son and I (and my baby daddy who slept on a convertible armchair in my room) were in the hospital for four long days. Even after getting home, my priorities had shifted enough that getting on the scale was not the first thing I thought to do. But I thought of it on the second day home.
I had been through hell. Not only had a baby, placenta and assorted stuff been surgically removed, I had done a great deal of vomiting and no eating. I figured I must have lost a ton of weight. I got on the scale with very high hopes. I got on and off the scale four or five times. I asked baby daddy if something bad had happened to the scale while we were in the hospital. Somehow I weighed four pounds more than I had before giving birth. My weight loss master plan had been foiled by being on an I.V. for four days. I was more than 50 pounds overweight. Oh. My. God.
While I admit I figured out the number of calories I burned each hour I breastfed, I didn't do anything differently in my breastfeeding relationship in order to lose weight. I read lots of stories of women whose weight just fell away. I heard of women who were struggling to keep weight on. I was not one of those women. There was a time I felt betrayed by the breastfeeding weight loss myth. In the end, post-partum, as during every other period of my life, I lost weight through diet and exercise. Okay, truthfully just diet.
There has a been a fresh run of news stories about breastfeeding and weight loss. I don't know why – perhaps yet another tall, thin, actress attributed her rapid return to svelte to her breastfeeding and not her personal trainer. I always wonder why these stories are considered news. Are these stories about breastfeeding and weight loss so popular because it encourages women to breastfeed? Do women really make the decision not to use formula because they think breastfeeding leads to rapid weight loss? Wouldn't that just be sad? Or is there just titillation in reading about Angelina Jolie's breasts?
It makes me angry – no amount of breastfeeding was ever going to turn me into Angelina Jolie. Did I want breastfeeding to help me take off the weight I shouldn't have put on in the first place? Yeah. Would I have made a different infant feeding decision based on whether breastfeeding helped me lose weight? Of course not.
The great Amy Spangler wrote this piece about the scientific evidence concerning breastfeeding and weight loss. It is short and to the point. Breastfeeding can result in an average weight loss of 4.4 pounds. This is a good thing but in the long list of ways in which breastfeeding is superior to formula feeding for both mother and child, it is no big deal. So how about more breastfeeding journalism that matters and less that creates unrealistic expectations for us just plain (chubby) folk.
Back in July of 2007, I gave a session on Breastfeeding and the Law at the La Leche League International Conference in Chicago. Good session, if I do say so myself, which you can buy on CD here. [Disclaimer: I don't make a cent if you buy it.] While at the Conference, I also did a podcast which has just become available for free here.
So why listen to me talking about the state of breastfeeding law over two years ago? Well, sadly, while there have been some new breastfeeding laws passed – both good and bad – breastfeeding law, and the public attitude toward breastfeeding rights in general, really haven't changed much.
Word of warning, the podcast is almost fifty minutes long so grab some knitting or a hungry baby or something else to do while you listen. I think there some amusing things to learn about my parenting life (how many times do I use the word "clueless" to describe myself as a new parent?) and the role La Leche League has played in it (and how I took my job as Group librarian entirely too seriously). Also I talk about the history of breastfeeding law, current laws and attitudes, and my experience working with the Ronald McDonald House moms. The Ronald McDonald House incident had happened recently and, if anyone is unclear about this, neither Ronald McDonald House of Houston nor Ronald McDonald House Charities has ever dealt appropriately with the moms. So you are going to hear a good bit of justified Jake outrage.
Hope you enjoy it and would love to hear impressions. If nothing else, you have to love a podcast that ends because the interviewer's baby needs a diaper change.
-Woman calls police for help because she is being beaten by her boyfriend as she tries to leave her apartment.
-Police arrive, describe her as "extremely intoxicated" but do not question her ability to care for her six week old daughter until she "began breastfeeding her infant in front of us."
-Woman loses custody of her child for six months, is then sentenced to a minimum of another six months away from her child, leaves the courthouse after sentencing and slashes someone's tires as well as, possibly, her own wrists.
Anvarinia’s demeanor, a strong smell of alcohol on her and the alcohol containers throughout the apartment suggested to him that she was intoxicated.
and
he saw Anvarinia shake the baby girl, hold her without supporting her head and, at one point, hold her upside down by one leg
However, none of this is in the original incident report by the same officer. If a six week old infant were being held upside down by one leg and shaken, would you wait until the mother put the child to the breast to arrest her for child neglect? Would the breastfeeding and nothing else be in the arrest report?
If we are to assume that Anvarinia indeed has an alcohol problem, it was some solace that, though she lost custody of her daughter for at least a year and her abuser walked away with no charges, her sentence included substance abuse treatment. Well, not anymore. In today's report:
Stacey Anvarinia, 26, had been allowed to spend at least part of her sentence at a substance abuse treatment facility, but Judge Sonja Clapp of the State District Court rescinded that option today.
The judge has sent a battered mother who allegedly has an alcohol problem straight to jail and, as punishment for allegedly getting drunk again, won't let her go to alcohol treatment.
Mothers can learn a lot of very disturbing lessons from the Anvarinia case. If you are being beaten while trying to escape an abusive boyfriend, calling the police may result in losing custody of your child. And your abuser won't be charged with any crime. If you plead guilty to charges for which the state appears to have very little evidence in exchange for a lighter sentence and substance abuse treatment, you better not abuse substances before you get treatment because the judge will change your sentence to deny you the treatment you need. So the punishment for being abused is losing your child and the punishment for being an alcoholic is not getting alcohol treatment. Please, someone tell me who this protects?
As promised, here is an update on Stacey Anvarinia, the North Dakota women who pled guilty to child neglect for allegedly breastfeeding her six-week-old daughter while drunk. For more on what appears to be a startling lack of evidence, see my post here. My suspicion that Anvarinia pled guilty as part of a deal for a lighter sentence and return of her baby seems to have been spot on.
According to the Grand Forks Herald, rather than the maximum sentence of five years imprisonment, Anvarinia was sentenced today to six months which she can serve in a substance abuse treatment facility. No news story published before today has mentioned whether Anvarinia had custody of her infant daughter since the arrest. In my previous blog post, I wondered whether she might have waived her right to trial in order to get her child returned to her. The Grand Forks Herald reports that at Anvarinia's sentencing she said:
"I’m very sorry for what I did, and I know it was wrong,” 26-year-old Stacey Anvarinia told the judge. “And I would like to continue working toward getting my daughter back.
So Anvarinia does not currently have her daughter and does not appear to know when she will regain custody of her. She was arrested in this case on February 13, 2009. As of today's sentencing then, she has been without her daughter for nearly six months and can now, it appears, look forward to at least another six months without her.
The brief news released today makes no mention of Delbert Harrison, the man Anvarinia says was beating her when she called police for help. As of last week, he had not been arrested or charged. Anvarinia's sentence for calling for help is a year without custody of her daughter, six months of which will be in some sort of detention.
Even if Anvarinia was intoxicated when police arrived – something for which there is apparently no evidence other then the police shock at her breastfeeding in their presence – is the loss of custody for a year (or more) and detention for six months an appropriate sentence? If you were a breastfeeding mother in need of help, how willing would you be to call the police? You might find yourself nursing an infant one minute, and regaining custody of a toddler a year later.
Clapp sentenced Anvarinia to 18 months in jail with all but six months suspended and said Anvarinia could get credit for chemical dependency treatment.
So Anvarinia's sentence is more severe than I reported above. Many thanks to Cate Nelson for the heads-up on this.
When I read the Associated Press story this past June about the guilty plea for "child abuse or neglect" by a North Dakota woman alleged to have breastfed her child while intoxicated, a few things leapt off the screen at me. I wondered why this mother had pled guilty. As a lawyer I know that people don't plead guilty because they are guilty. Guilty pleas are generally the result of a deal. The accused is waiving the right to a trial in exchange for an agreed upon sentence or in order to be charged with a lesser crime. Sometimes they plead guilty because they are frightened or inadequately represented or fear losing or being separated from their children. This woman pled guilty to the original charge so the "deal for a lesser charge" theory can be eliminated. Why then?
Also of significance to me was that the police were called to the mother's home in response to a "domestic disturbance" call. Often "domestic disturbance" means that the call was in response to domestic violence. Had the original call been made so police would protect the mother?
[s]he was assaulted by her boyfriend identified as Harrison, Delbert.
She stated he kneed her in the chin and struck her face when she attempted to leave.
Officers observed red and swelling area on the bridge of her nose, a small scratch to her left cheek, and a red swollen area on her chin.
So Anvarinia had called the police because she had been the victim of a crime. She called for help.
Also according to the police reports, "she was extremely intoxicated." How did the police know this? Neither the police reports nor subsequent police comments to the press give any indication. No report says police smelled alcohol, saw alcohol, heard slurred speech, and the police did not administer a blood-alcohol test. What behavior did Anvarinia engage in that led to her arrest for child abuse or neglect? She "began breast feeding in front of us." Paramedics were called but they transported the baby to the hospital. Battered Stacey Anvarinia was taken to jail.
Reports of this story led to much debate about the safety of drinking alcohol while breastfeeding. That is certainly an important issue. However, for Stacey Anvarinia, I wonder whether we have any reason to believe she was intoxicated at all. As this case got more press, the Grand Forks police have gotten a little defensive on this point:
Well, what truly is the totality of the circumstances? In defense of itself, the police cite her breastfeeding as … what? Evidence of her intoxication? Might having been recently beaten cause one to seem disoriented? Check the time she is alleged to have committed the "crime." 3:57 a.m. Had she slept at all that night? She had injuries to her face. Did she have a head injury? Despite protests that breastfeeding isn't the issue, the police still only point to her breastfeeding in front of them as being "unusual" in her behavior.
What then happened to Delbert Harrison, the man identified as having beaten Stacey Anvarinia? He was neither arrested nor charged with any crime. Why not?
According to a 2005 study in the American Journal of Public Health, homicide is the third leading cause of injury-related death for women who are pregnant or who have given birth in the previous year. A 2002 study in The British Medical Journal concluded that a woman's risk of domestic violence doubles during pregnancy and the year after birth. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported in 2005 that due to poor reporting, we really don't have accurate figures on how high the rate of homicide is for women during pregnancy and the post-partum period because few states report whether a homicide victim was pregnant or had recently given birth. Even given the admitted under-reporting, homicide was found to be the second leading cause of injury-related maternal death. Of those deaths, 57% were caused by gunfire.
Stacey Anvarinia could have been a homicide statistic. According to the police report, she was beaten while trying to leave. She reached out to the police to save her. Instead, they arrested her.
According to news reports, Anvarinia will be sentenced this Friday. Let's see how much jail time you get for breastfeeding in front of the police you ask to save your life.
I woke up this morning shaking from a nightmare. My jaw hurt from grinding my teeth. My palms were sore from clenching my fists.
I knew immediately that it had been a bad dream but it has been difficult to shake off. In it, I was in a hotel room in a foreign city with my eldest son and a man from my past. An abusive, disturbed man who remembering still makes my skin feels as if it is not my own. In the dream I was struggling to find all of my son's and my clothing so that I could us sneak away. For some reason, my son and this man were going somewhere together and, again inexplicably, I thought this would help give me a chance to gather all of our things. But when the man returned my son was not with him. He said that my son had taken too long to get in the car so he had left my son on the street. During the rest of the nightmare I was screaming my son's name out of the window and walking the streets searching for him, bellowing his name in hysteria. Finally, in despair, I went back to the hotel where I found my son had returned. He didn't know I had been looking for him and he just wanted to tell me what a good time he had had meeting new people and seeing new things. It was a reenactment of a conversation I have had with him many times in real life but in the dream I could not stay calm as I hollered about not disappearing without telling me where he is going, not staying away for more than twenty minutes without calling, how frightened I had been, how dangerous the world is.
And then I woke up. Realizing my son was safely asleep upstairs and that this man from my past is long dead did not help me with the panic attack I suffered for several hours.
No consultation with Freud is necessary to understand why I had this nightmare and why I had it when I did. Tomorrow my first born, my baby, will turn fifteen.
My son is bright and engaging. He chats up anyone who stands still long enough. He wants to know what you are passionate about and he wants to tell you about his favorite architect, the local community feud about the election of township commissioners, the quality of programming on BBC (we live in the US). My son trusts people until they show they can not be trusted.
When I was fifteen, the long battle between my divorced parents over who wouldn't have custody ended with both refusing to keep me. I was on my own, hiding from the social workers who would put me in foster care if they knew. From the age of fifteen, until my son was born sixteen years later, no family member gave me shelter. Most of the time no one in my family even knew where I was and, as far as I can tell, none of them cared. My children are the only blood relatives I have lived with since I was the age my baby boy will be tomorrow.
I don't spend much time feeling sorry for myself or dwelling on my childhood. It was, I am, it is (thankfully) over. But it has been difficult comparing myself at fifteen to my son at fifteen. He is a curious and independent child (like I was). He can do his own laundry and cook himself most meals (as I could). But he has not seen pure evil. He has never had to worry about where he would sleep. He has never … many things no child should do or see or know.
Most days these differences between us make me feel relief. I have spared him these things. But on days like today, covered with the sense memory of dreams like last night's, I fear for him. Who will he trust in his innocence? Have I, in keeping him safe, left him exposed?
Like many mammals, my son's trips away from me are in larger and larger circles. He proudly reports the miles on his bike odometer and I pretend I can breath. Tomorrow he will be the age I was when I was utterly abandoned by the people who were supposed to keep me safe. We will have cake and go out to dinner. And I will continue to worry how safe he really is.
Today is the 2009 National Day of Silence, a day to protest bullying and harassment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in schools. Begun in 1996 as a student protest at the University of Virginia, it has grown to participation by over 8,000 middle and high school, colleges and universities, throughout the U.S. While the central act is a period of silence, today's activities draw attention both to the prevalence of anti-LGBT attacks in schools but also to entrenched homophobia among students and the silence on the part of society concerning it.
At 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time this afternoon I logged on to a Tweetchat of Day of Silence supporters. The feed was flooded with young people talking about how events had gone in their schools, how their teachers responded to their refusal to speak, whether they had been harassed for being LGBT or just being perceived as being LGBT. They talked about coming out to their parents and they talked about being afraid to. And this was on Twitter so this pain and anger and support and kinship all came in bursts of 140 characters. There were also allies like me in the chat – people who support the students and many who shared their own memories of being too afraid in school to be who they are.
Carl Walker-Hoover would have turned twelve years old today. However, after a school year of being bullied for "acting gay," Carl committed suicide last week. Reading about Carl's final note, leaving his Pokemon cards to his little brother, I could not help but think of my own boys his age. One of my sons loves the color pink and has taken a good bit of teasing for wearing the color whenever he can. My boys have also told me about how the word "gay" has, in the years between my childhood and theirs, become synonymous with "bad," "ugly," and "uncool."
My kids know lots of adults who are gay and we have had the discussion many times about how wrong it is use "gay" as an insult. But it is hard for them to share their feelings about this with their friends. Today I found a few videos at ThinkB4YouSpeak which provide some clear tips called "Don't Be Afraid to Tell Someone it's Not OK to Say That's So Gay." I highly recommend them.
So with my kids we talk and, while I don't think they are old enough to hear about Carl Walker-Hoover's suicide, we have watched the ThinkB4YouSpeak videos. We role play dealing with things friends say and do that is not okay.
What do you do at your house? How do you discuss homophobia and bullying at your house? Let's share our thoughts and ideas in the hope we will raise a generation of people who can proudly be whoever they are. Let's make sure there are no more children who feel the pain Carl Walker-Hoover did.
Seems odd to me that people are confused about what to do when a woman is breastfeeding her child on an airplane. If you have ever walked on a plane with a small child, you know that look on people's faces – that look that says "please, please don't sit next to me." No one wants to be trapped near a crying, fussing child. Why then would anyone object to anything (safe) that would silence an unhappy child?
I was among many who were shocked in late 2006 when Emily Gillette and her family were thrown off a Delta Airlines flight for refusing to put a blanket over her breastfeeding child's head. While the Gillette case resulted in a multi-city nurse-in and an on-going lawsuit – both of which I have been writing about in Mothering – it also generated lots of negative statements about breastfeeding in public generally and breastfeeding on airplanes specifically.
I was surprised recently (though shouldn't have been) to find that Her Bad Mother, who blogged in September of last year about her experience with a rude flight attendant on WestJet, was still getting comments about her experience – 213 comments at this writing and still coming in. In Under the Blanket, Her Bad Mother blogger Catherine writes about how humiliated she was by a flight attendant pressuring her to cover her breastfeeding child with a blanket and finally throwing the blanket next to her when Catherine refused. It is an eloquent, sad, and truthful post about how vulnerable we are when we are feeding our children. Please go read it.
Most of the many comments to Catherine's blog post are supportive – lots of angry mothers wanting WestJet to apologize for this unacceptable flight attendant. Some of those commenting try to justify the flight attendant – perhaps the flight attendant actually thought she was being helpful, they write. And then there are the other comments. The nasty "I don't want to see your boobs" comments. And there is the response from WestJet which maintained requiring a cover is within the rights of the airline and then announced a change in policy (apparently in response to another well-publicized breastfeeding harassment case on a WestJet flight early last year).
Clearly people need a primer. It isn't a legal analysis – you get enough of that from me. It is a primer about being human. So here it is and I owe it to a woman who sat next to me on an airplane a decade ago.
I was flying alone with my two eldest sons. One was three years old and one was a few months old. Both were breastfeeding. My large infant (ten pounds at birth and much larger at a few months) was in a sling and I walked down the airplane aisle with my toddler holding one hand, dragging a car seat behind me with the other hand, and averting my eyes from all the panicked "please don't sit next to me" looks of my fellow passengers. I had a window seat and I secured the car seat into the middle seat. I knew that both my sons were going to want to nurse at some point during the flight and since each had always steadfastly refused to nurse while the other did, I knew I would need to switch them in and out of the car seat.
When the person assigned to the aisle seat arrived, it was an older woman perhaps in her sixties. She looked at me with my kids and their toys and the sling and the car seat and seemed … well … tense. I had no idea how she would react once the nursing started. No sooner had the doors closed when the boys started racing for my breasts. As soon as one came off the breast, the other wanted to nurse. Whichever boy wasn't nursing was squirming, crying, and tossing toys on the ground I couldn't reach. The woman in the aisle seat looked increasingly uncomfortable. She looked at me, then looked away. Twice it seemed as if she was about to say something and then didn't. I tried to prepare myself for her comment. Completely overwhelmed, I was torn between an indignant reply and just bursting into tears. And then she spoke:
"If it is okay with you, would it help if I held whichever child isn't nursing?"
Fighting back my tears, I said, "Yes! Thank you so much!"
For the next few hours, this wonderful stranger played with whichever child wasn't nursing, cheerfully passed my sons back and forth to me, fetched the toys from the ground. When the flight attendant ignored me, our new friend asked what I needed and set up my water on her tray. At one point, she even stood in the aisle and rocked my chubby baby in her arms. We never talked about breastfeeding or whether she was a mother or a grandmother. I don't think we even exchanged names, though she asked the boys' names so she could chat with them while they played. She saw I needed help and she helped me. I thanked her again and again but she only smiled back at me.
So, whoever you are, the person in the next seat or many rows away, and particularly if you are the flight attendant who is actually being paid to help the passengers, if you see a breastfeeding woman, consider what she needs. A smile might be all. If she is alone, chances are she needs some help managing toys or kid stuff. At the very least, she needs something to drink. If a breastfeeding woman (or anyone traveling with a child) is on a plane with you, help her.
Now, was that so hard? If being the wonderful stranger who sat next to me isn't what you would do, read the primer again. There will be a pop quiz. Mothers who need your help are everywhere. You may need to take the quiz tomorrow.
In a dark chapter of Canadian history, the Dionne quintuplets were a more popular tourist attraction than Niagara Falls. Back in 1934, the first known surviving quintuplets involved no reproductive technology – ethical or unethical. The Dionne girls were the product of one egg, fertilized during sexual intercourse, splitting into five embryos. What happened after they were born was a different matter and this is where the parallel to the Suleman octuplets begins.
The Dionnes were poor uneducated farmers who already struggled to support their five living older children (a sixth had died). The Ontario government made the Dionne girls wards of the state and put a staff in charge of their care, which, in accord with the science of the day, meant isolation from germs, including those which might be carried by the girls' mother with whom they were allowed minimal contact.
Back to the Sulemans. If you want to find criticism of how these children came to be, it is everywhere. I too will watch the investigation of the fertility specialist who implanted all of these fertilized eggs and the medical specialty now scrambling to prove it can police itself. Nadya Suleman chose to have all of these children while the Dionnes did not. But the Suleman children did not chose how they were made any more than the Dionne girls did. And the Suleman children will not be able to control the way they may now be exploited any more than the Dionne girls could.
Looking at The Suleman Family Website [available in the morning of 2/16, by evening this site was down] and reading about public relations reps. and reality shows, I am reminded of Quintland. Between 1934 and 1943, an estimated three million tourists visited this Depression-era theme park in northern Ontario where these five little girls lived on display like zoo animals. The Ontario government and local business made a half billion dollars from this circus, little of which came to the girls. When, after nine years of litigation, the girls were returned to their family, they were sexually abused by their father who also marketed products with their name and image. Still the public was more interested in owning a Dionne Quintuplet doll, than protecting the Dionne girls themselves.
The Dionne quintuplets should serve as a cautionary tale but fetishizing multiples continues. Not lost on the surviving Dionnes themselves, they wrote an "Open Letter" in 1997 to the parents of another set of multiples. It is a document which should be read by Nadya Suleman, and the Duggers, and Jon & Kate. It is a plea from three old women whose lives, and those of the two sisters who predeceased them, were destroyed by the greed and prurience of family and community:
Multiple births should not be confused with entertainment, nor should they be an opportunity to sell products.
Now, who should be responsible for taking care of the Suleman children? We all should, just as we all should be responsible for all children. But there are people who bear a greater responsibility for these fourteen kids (yes, I mean all of Nadya's children) than I do and I think they should be ahead of me in line when the orthodontia bill needs to be paid. Of course, Nadya herself, who somehow thought money and child care would fall from the heavens to maintain her baby habit. But behind her, let's put the man who provided the sperm if indeed he either supported or did not forbid its use to make all of these children. Let's follow the sperm donor with all the medical personnel who were involved in the implantations. Why should any of these people be allowed to remain aloof from the consequences of their actions? If you are going to play a role in creating a baby, you should change diapers, buy food, pay bills, schedule and attend doctors visits (I am guessing a lot of doctors' visits). Any idea of the time commitment involved in occupational therapy alone? I do. Alot. Nadya Suleman has one autistic child. How many of the newest eight will have special needs?
I don't condemn Nadya Suleman for having children without being married or having a mate. I don't condemn her for being unemployed. If she hadn't been unemployed before she had kids, she likely would have been either unemployed or underemployed after she had kids. In the U.S. there is very little support (economic or other) for mothers. I will condemn her if she exploits her kids.
I condemn both her and the medical professionals who took her money for treating children like just one more thing you can buy. The Suleman octuplets came into the world as commodities, sold to a compulsive shopper by greedy technicians more concerned with selling the product than the physical or psychological well-being of anyone involved.
How about now we turn our attention to making sure these children, and all children, are well cared for. One way we can do that is by refusing to watch the reality show or buy the octuplet-endorsed diapers. Just say no. Let's turn our attention to all mothers who need help supporting their children and discourage parents from supporting large families by selling them. Babies aren't just more stuff. And parents have to be something better than pimps.
I have been seeing offensive headlines about Salma Hayek for a few days. "Salma Hayek Feeds the World!" It seems every time a celebrity makes a comment about breastfeeding – usually about losing weight – it generates more press than an embassy bombing. When I realized that this story was about Hayek putting a starving African baby to her breast, it got my attention.
The video is an ABC News Nightline segment on Hayek's trip to Sierra Leone to promote a UNICEF/Proctor & Gamble joint project concerning tetanus vaccination in Africa. Through much of the story, I have some questions and reservations.
Proctor & Gamble will "contribute" one tetanus vaccination (which, according to this report, costs seven cents) for each package of specially marked Pampers disposable diapers purchased. Hmm, P & G hard up for cash? Instead of actually contributing, Proctor & Gamble will give a cut of its profits – a really tiny cut – if others buy its high priced brand of one of the primary sources of non-recyclable trash.
I wonder also which pharmaceutical company makes this vaccine and whether there are toxic contents. I wonder what informed consent the women getting this vaccine receive – particularly given the disturbing bit of this clip in which Hayek herself is giving a women an injection (um … at least "do not try this at home"?). There is mention also that there is medicine that could save these dying children but it is too expensive. Hey, P & G, how about paying for the medicine for children who are already sick since vaccinating the mothers won't save these babies?
For the moment let me put aside concerns about how this project might increase disposable diaper use. I used some cloth but I admit I used mostly disposable diapers on my kids. Put aside my concerns about other effects of the vaccination. Tetanus is a very easy disease to prevent when you have clean running water and disinfectant but, be forewarned, in this video clip you will see an infant die. Sierra Leone is a country in which many people do not have clean running water. There is discussion of some regional practices which contribute to the transmission of tetanus (packing the umbilical cord with animal dung) that UNICEF is educating people against.
The last third of this video discusses the need for greater breastfeeding education among the people of Sierra Leone. According to this story, UNICEF is encouraging women to breastfeed their babies for two years (yay!) and the babies' fathers are discouraging breastfeeding because they don't have sex with breastfeeding women.
It is this discussion that leads to a fascinating part of this segment. Hayek picks up a crying infant (presumably with consent of its mother) and puts him to her breast. Hayek then talks about sharing her year old daughter's milk with this tiny infant who needs it. The footage of this infant nursing with gusto at Hayek's breast is awe inspiring.
There is a lot wrong with this story. How is vaccinating mothers going to "eradicate" a disease babies are getting from dung and mud? What lack of moral code leads Procter & Gamble to "promote the brand" before it gives seven frigging cents? Where is the medicine for the children who actually have tetanus? But Hayek picking up a starving baby and feeding it at her full breast is absolutely right. I would do it in a heartbeat. I hope every mother would.
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