“… A proper ringing toast soothes the savage beast,” Karen Krizanovich writes. “Taste has a sound and it’s the thing with the ding that is the ding an sich of the memorable toast.” We teach our little ones civility and celebration and merriment at a young age; the clunk of a sippy cup meets a mug of coffee, toasting the adventures of a toddler. One mother shares that her 15 month old decided to start “cheers-ing” her breasts together before she nurses.
Closing out National Humor Month, this endearing anecdote is the inspiration for this week’s post.
Parenting is serious business, and those who support parents through their responsibilities undertake weighty duties too, but amidst the seriousness, there is hilarity and light.
In 2019, we published Cheap medicine: laughter, where you’ll find research on laughter as it relates to infants, development, breastfeeding, and prosocial behavior.
This week, we’ve compiled a collection of breastfeeding-related material to make you laugh. Interestingly, in our search for funnies, we found that many of these pieces are reactions to the absurdity of infant feeding culture in the U.S. For instance, there is a comic depicting a breastfeeding dyad in front of an ad of a buxom woman. Two men approach, shaming the dyad, “Nursing?! This is a shopping mall! We can’t allow women to brazenly display their breasts!” It makes you chuckle, but of course the undertone is depressing. Nikki Lee wrote commentary on the real-life manifestation of this absurdity. Find it here.
In another case, humor is used as a coping and healing mechanism as well as commentary on the Pinkwashing of the breast cancer epidemic. Poet and performer Christine Rathbun Ernst’s delivery will make you laugh and ask you to consider some really raw, hard topics. Find her work here.
We’d love to hear your funny stories, as a professional or parent. You can email us at info@ourmilkyway.org, or share your story in the comments below.
–This post is part of our 10-year anniversary series “Breastfeeding is…” When we initially curated this series, we planned for 10 weeks, but breastfeeding is so many things that we just couldn’t fit it all in, which means we have two bonus weeks in our anniversary series.–
Breastfeeding is ours. Breastfeeding belongs to us.
Nicole Starr Photography Originally featured on Our Milky Way in ‘ Non-profit Julia’s Way proves babies with Down syndrome can breastfeed’
For decades, the 55 billion dollar formula milk industry has positioned itself as an ally to parents.
Through conniving tactics, like the distortion of science to legitimize their claims, the systematic targeting of health professionals to promote their products, and the undermining of parents’ confidence in breastfeeding, the industry impacts the survival, health and development of children and mothers, disrupts truthful information– an essential human right as noted by theConvention on the Rights of the Child, disregards the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes, and exploits the aspirations, vulnerabilities and fears at the birth and early years of our children solely for commercial gain. (WHO/UNICEF, 2022, p. x) [More at WHO report exposes formula milk marketing, offers steps forward]
Far before the advent of formula milks and their subsequent marketing campaigns, breastfeeding sustained the human species. When breastfeeding wasn’t possible, wet nursing was the primary alternative feeding option. [Stevens, et al 2009]
For generations, cultures across the globe have honored breastfeeding as a central part of their identities, and now they’re reclaiming these traditions after being challenged by the formula milk industry and other forces.
Photo by Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz : https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-breastfeeding-her-son-12359528/
Photo by willsantt: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-breastfeeding-her-toddler-under-the-tree-2714618/
Cuni offers commentary on her and her colleague’s responsibility to help facilitate breastfeeding without capitalizing, claiming and dominating. She sees her role as an empowerer.
Without diminishing the need for larger structural supports, let us also remember and celebrate the innate power we hold as individuals who can nourish and nurture our young and ourselves through breastfeeding.
___
Our 10-year anniversary giveaway has ended. Thank you to everyone who participated!
Our headlines are overloaded with tragedy, perversion, inequities, the unthinkable yet preventable.
Journalist Mary Pilon says in Throughline’s Do Not Pass Go episode “It’s a shame to waste a crisis. A crisis can also be a moment when you look at things and make changes and improvements.”
The Four Pillars of Infant Nutrition Security in the United States by Amelia Psmythe Seger, Deputy Director USBC
Throughout its 22-year history, the U.S. Breastfeeding Committee has been working towards the policy, systems, and environmental changes that build a landscape of breastfeeding support.
The catastrophic infant formula shortage demonstrates the value of this work and the need to build a robust infrastructure for infant nutrition security in the U.S. that holds all families in care.
This infrastructure includes four pillars: Parents, Programs, Policies, and a Plan for emergencies.
Parents:
Parents are critical stakeholders in infant nutrition security. The Parents pillar includes people of all races, genders, caregiving roles, routes to parenthood, immigration status, religious or political views, and infant feeding methods. Everyone who loves and cares for a young child belongs. Welcome.
Parents deserve the full support of a robust national infant nutrition security infrastructure. Without it, many are forced onto painful and difficult paths of infant feeding and care. The U.S. needs equitable programs, policies, and a plan for emergencies that centers on the most impacted.Parents and caregivers whose infants rely on formula are the highest priority right now. They need help finding formula, advice on switching between formulas, reassurance that reliable supplies are on the way, and an answer to the question: what should I feed my baby if I cannot find formula? With appropriate caution, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published an article on what to feed babies of different ages and situations in an extreme emergency (such as this). Babies under six months should truly only consume human milk or infant formula. In considering very short-term alternatives, the stakes are so high that a physician should monitor the baby.
Parents who are breastfeeding or feeding human milk are in anguish right now, too. Many are feeling pressure to share their milk without acknowledgment of how hard this society has made it to establish and maintain milk supply. Few families have access to lactation support providers, paid family leave, and workplace accommodations to pump breast milk during the workday. In this context, many turn to formula as their backup plan, and it is very scary for them to see that their safety net is in tatters. To answer questions related to human milk, the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine (ABM) published a guide. This ABM guide addresses pregnancy, low milk supply, re-lactation, options for donation or safe milk sharing, and healthcare guidance and training.
Additional burdens or blame should never be placed on the families and caregivers whose hands are literally full of babies and toddlers. When capacity allows, however, the collective potential power of parents is significant. Consider if parents insisted on being at the table with the commercial milk formula industry, playing a role in ensuring industry quality, safety, and ethics. They are key stakeholders, after all, so this should be encouraged. Parents could also insist the U.S. enhance our nonprofit milk banking system to ensure an affordable, plentiful donor milk supply for medically fragile infants and those whose parents cannot or do not wish to breastfeed. This would diversify the infant food supply and provide parents with more options.
Programs:
Federal programmatic funding needs to be expanded considering setbacks caused by the pandemic, including the current infant formula shortage.
Federal funding supports quality improvement investments to implement maternity care best practices in hospitals, especially while recovering from pandemic-induced breakdowns in those settings.
Expansion of this funding supports state and community efforts to advance care coordination and strengthen lactation support through policy, systems, and environmental change interventions to reduce or eliminate breastfeeding disparities along the fault lines of income and race.
Federal investments enhance and deepen partnerships to integrate infant feeding and lactation support services into emergency response systems and food security programs during acute disasters and prolonged public health crises.
This funding supports critical national monitoring and public reporting activities, including annual analysis of the National Immunization Survey (NIS), administration of the bi-annual Maternity Practices in Infant Nutrition and Care (mPINC) Survey, bi-annual production of the National Breastfeeding Report Card, and administration of the longitudinal Infant Feeding Practices Study. All of which is especially needed in light of recent updates to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which, for the first time, provides nutritional guidance for infants and toddlers.
Policies:
Due to major policy gaps, families face obstacles that make it difficult or impossible to start or continue breastfeeding. Policymakers must choose to prioritize the policies and investments for infant food security so that we never find ourselves in this situation again.
Critically needed policy solutions are waiting for Congressional action:
Establish a national paid family and medical leave program. The FAMILY Act (S. 248/H.R. 804) would ensure that families have time to recover from childbirth and establish a strong breastfeeding relationship before returning to work.
Ensure all breastfeeding workers have time and space to pump during the workday. The Providing Urgent Maternal Protections (PUMP) Act (S. 1658/H.R. 3110) would close gaps in the Break Time for Nursing Mothers Law, giving 9 million more workers time and space to pump. Contact your legislators about the PUMP Act!
Invest in the CDC Hospitals Promoting Breastfeeding program by increasing funding to $20M in FY2023. This funding helps families start and continue breastfeeding through maternity care practice improvements and community and workplace support programs.
Create a formal plan for infant and young child feeding in emergencies. The DEMAND Act (S. 3601/H.R. 6555) would ensure the Federal Emergency Management Agency can better support access to lactation support and supplies during disasters. Contact your legislators about the DEMAND Act!
Additional areas for policy development
The U.S. has not regulated the marketing practices of the commercial milk formula industry, unlike 70% of the world, which has implemented at least some part of the WHO’s International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes. In the absence of regulation, these marketing practices are predatory.
Diversify the nation’s production of infant formula. Plainly it is a mistake to allow 42% of the infant formula in this country to be produced not only by one company but by one factory of that company. Infant formula companies are part of an infant food security system, but we don’t have to be so dependent on that industry.Enhance the national network of nonprofit donor milk banks. Support innovative partnerships across existing structures, taking a cue from a national model such as what exists in Brazil. Consider: Red Cross has the infrastructure to support donor screening; WIC offices or community health clinics could be donor drop-off sites; more hospitals could provide space and equipment for donor milk processing and distribution, as some have done. Models exist to create an affordable and plentiful alternative to commercial milk formula when a parent’s own milk is not available.
Plan:
All nations should have a robust plan for infant and young child feeding in emergencies that includes three phases: preparedness, response, and resiliency. The USBC-Affiliated Infant & Young Child Feeding Constellation has published a Joint Statement on Infant & Young Child Feeding in Emergencies (IYCF-E) in the U.S. context. Emergency preparedness includes building a lactation support provider directory and a system to track the inventory of national resources such as infant formula.Emergency response for infants, young children, and their families must include priority shelter, trauma-informed care, lactation support providers in every community; access to breast pumps, and milk storage and cleaning supplies; non-branded infant formula, clean water, bottles, and cleaning supplies.
Emergency resilience includes trauma-informed care that centers on the needs of communities that have been historically undersupported, and disproportionately impacted in emergencies.
Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. The insufficient system we’ve had, led to this crisis. It was predictable, and thus it was preventable.
Now that there’s a mass mobilization of activity – from neighbors driving many miles to find spare formula tins, to the President invoking the defense production act – we must collectively build the resiliency to support a community during a flood, a region during a power outage, or a nation during a pandemic and supply chain crisis. We will get through this because we must. Together we must ensure we build an infant nutrition security system worthy of parent’s trust.
A medical student once told Nikki Lee, RN, BSN, MS, Mother of 2, IBCLC,RLC, CCE, CIMI, CST (cert.appl.), ANLC, RYT500 about an obstetrician who loved to pump while she was catching babies because she collected more milk than usual. Lee theorizes that perhaps it was due to the high levels of oxytocin in the atmosphere during childbirth.
It’s a fascinating concept, and quite unusual considering physicians often find themselves in a terrible paradox. As Lee puts it, they are supposed to take care of everybody else, and no one takes care of them. They’re expected to be experts on everything; as childbirth educators and lactation care providers, we often disclaim “this information is not meant as a substitute for medical advice.”
In this two-part series, Lee and I set out to explore the forces that surround infant feeding, ones that physicians must muscle through as parents themselves and as professionals. We explore emerging themes inspired by the article Medical training taught this Philadelphia doctor about breast feeding. But the real lessons came from her twins. In Part One, we offer thoughts on physicians functioning as parents themselves. Part Two covers physicians as professionals trying to support breastfeeding most often with inadequate education and training.
Source: United States Breastfeeding Committee
With insufficient support in their personal infant feeding goals, physicians’ struggles sometimes seem to spur advocacy and a “do-better-for-my patients” attitude. Just the same, these experiences can lead individuals to harbor resentment, despair, resignation and defeat, and might unintentionally influence the breastfeeding support they are able to offer their patients.
When physicians’ basic needs aren’t met, we can’t expect them to meet the needs of their patients. How can one pour from an empty cup? Kathleen Kendall Tackett offers Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Self Care for Members of the Perinatal Team which presents insights on the effects of little institutional support and specific strategies for integrating self-care into care for others.
Self-care is sustainable only when everyone can do it.
Before physicians are done with their decade or more of training, they are challenged by inadequate support in their efforts to feed their own children.
What’s more, a recent research letter, American Board of Medical Specialties Board Examination Lactation Accommodation, evaluates the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) member boards’ lactation-specific board examination accommodation policies highlighting that a minority of female physicians (42%) achieve the recommendation that infants receive mother’s milk at least until age one.
Source: United States Breastfeeding Committee
“Board examinations are a key aspect of medical training,” the authors begin. “With up to 22% of female trainees delivering a child during postgraduate training, and nearly 59, 000 female physicians in residency and fellowship in the US, there is a large group potentially affected by board examination lactation accommodations.”
About a decade ago, in a landmark case that has implications for all testing organizations in Massachusetts, a unanimous Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that breastfeeding mothers are entitled to special accommodations to allow them sufficient time to pump milk during lengthy testing for medical licensure. [https://www.wbur.org/news/2012/04/13/breastfeeding-doctor-ruling ]
The elephant in the room is the issue of parental leave. Honestly, it’s hard to stomach that we are still arguing that there are medical and psychosocial benefits of protected parental leave for both parents and children. The U.S. is the only Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member country—and one of only six countries in the world—without a national paid parental leave policy. The U.S. is also one of the few high-income countries without a national family caregiving or medical leave policy. [https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/paid-family-leave-across-oecd-countries/ ]
Women don’t breastfeed; societies do. The societal burden on the mother is magnified when the mother is a physician and is compelled to take care of everyone else, with no support for their own breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is blamed for being difficult, instead of us all getting furious that we don’t have paid maternity leave.
In the current U.S. healthcare system, physicians find themselves paid in Relative Value Units (RVUs), which bluntly put, is a pretty mechanical way to value providing care to other humans. In short, the more RVUs a physician racks up, the more they’re paid. Often that leaves lactating physicians forgoing pumping to spend more time with patients. The Providing Urgent Maternal Protections (PUMP) for Nursing Mothers Act would close the loopholes that force physicians to choose income or feeding their babies. The PUMP Act advanced out of the Senate HELP Committee with unanimous bipartisan support in May 2021 and then passed with significant bipartisan support (267-149) in the House last October. Despite this strong bipartisan support, the bill has languished in the Senate for almost a year. Get updates on progress here.
The policy reports that the Institutional Requirements of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education require training programs to provide written policies regarding leaves of absence, including parental leave, and these policies must comply with current legislation such as the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), but that the length of leave has considerable variability among residency programs. The statement outlines the challenges of parental leave policies in training programs and gives recommendations to protect trainees and their families. One challenge is that education calendars are set long before a person enters a medical program, but labor, delivery, and the establishment of breastfeeding don’t fit into a predetermined calendar.
Despite this dismal landscape, the medical world is changing and there are stories and models to celebrate.
Catherine Wagner, a cardiothoracic surgery resident at Michigan Medicine, managed to breastfeed and pump for a year during her residency with a network of support.
A committee at the University of Michigan is calling on pediatricians to support their fellow physicians. Pediatricians Advocating Breastfeeding: Let’s Start with Supporting our Fellow Pediatricians First describes the efforts to support lactation within the department. The committee collected university policies, state and federal laws, identified the needs of breastfeeding mothers and then created a policy to support lactating individuals as well as a handout to help supervisors and colleagues support lactating women in the healthcare setting. (Supplemental material; available at www.jpeds.com).
Got Milk? Design and Implementation of a Lactation Support Program for Surgeons describes an initiative where “Multiple faculty members offered to offload resident workload before starting cases to provide time for a lactating resident to express milk… The University of Wisconsin adopted a ‘cross-cover’ model encouraging lactating residents to have other residents assist in the operating room during non-critical portions of the case if the primary operating resident needed to express milk that has been very well received and easily implemented.”
Source: United States Breastfeeding Committee
There’s attention being paid to lactation accommodation information in urology residency programs too.
In this study, “Of 145 urology residency programs, 72.4% included information about lactation accommodations anywhere on the institution’s website.” The authors conclude that “efforts to recruit and retain female urologists should include making [lactation accommodation] information more easily accessible.”
Authors Annery G Garcia-Marcinkiewicz andSarah S Titler call on anesthesiology as a workforce and specialty, to support the unique need of lactating and breastfeeding anesthesiologists in Lactation and Anesthesiology.
This study offers the first comprehensive scoping review of the literature on breastfeeding policies pertaining to surgical residents in Canada.
The authors write: “…We aim to use these data to advocate for breast feeding for surgical resident physicians through the creation and improvement of current breastfeeding policies as applicable. This work aims to help change surgical culture to be more inclusive, which is vital in creating a breast feeding-friendly environment. This would include leadership endorsement of the policy, a culture shift (for example, no repercussions to resident for coming back on a modified schedule or taking breaks for expressing milk), visible educational notices throughout the workplace (ie, ‘breast feeding-friendly workplace’ notices, common in Canadian public settings), and creation of a network of ‘new moms’ within the surgical resident programme to ensure there is support and mentorship for new moms returning back to work. ”
While we wait for policies to catch up to the needs of lactating physicians, wearable pumps are helping them reach their infant feeding goals. The Impact of Wearable Breast Pumps on Physicians’ Breastfeeding Experience and Success found that “those who had used a wearable pump reported statistically significant shorter lactation breaks (p < 0.00001) and were more likely to be able to provide breast milk to their infants for their entire intended duration (p = 0.005) compared to the traditional pump group.”
The support network Dr. MILK (Mothers Interested in Lactation Knowledge) has been successful at helping physicians mothers reach their infant feeding goals.
Where else are you seeing physician parents being supported in their infant feeding journeys? Email us at info@ourmilkyway.org
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