Michelle Tant

This year has felt like one attack after another on breastfeeding. There's been the ongoing Facebook debacle; photos of breastfeeding being removed while Playboys pages are continued to be allowed to flaunt more flesh than a whole convention of breastfeeding mothers. Then there was the ridiculous opinion piece in the British Medical Journal which many newspapers, including The Daily Fail regurgitated as fact, further undermining the benefits of breastfeeding. Just this week I saw a short piece in Practical Parenting magazine about the Chinese developing GM cows to produce human milk! One sentence says the milk will have more nutritional content in it, though its unclear whether it means than breastmilk or than formula milk. And now this. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/campaigners-livid-as-whitehall-axes-breastfeeding-week-2287445.html Our beloved government in its wisdom has cut national support for National Breastfeeding ...

There was a worrying press article today about the rise in cases of breast cancer. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12356489 The phrase 'breast cancer' is enough to send any woman into a freefall of anxiety whether or not she has risk factors for the disease. The risk factors are... *smoking *oral contraceptives *drinking alcohol every day *obesity *family history Of course the indiscriminate nature of cancer means that women with no apparent risk factors may develop it and a boatload of risk factors might never. The report says a startling 1 in 8 women will develop breast cancer. That seems high to me. The question I immediately asked of Google was how can I protect myself? What preventative measures can I take if any? One was thankfully in my doorstep. Breastfeeding can actually reduce the chance of breast cancer by up to 50%, which is almost unbelievable. You do need to breastfeed for 2 years to get the full 50%. Check out this site for the stats if you l...

There has been a bit of a revival around this subject over the last few years. However its not a new topic by any means. Before breastfeeding books and gurus, new mothers had to rely on their instincts and on the women around them. Women and girls would have seen breastfeeding happening all the time, it was perfectly natural and to be blunt, there was no other choice. Babies who were not breastfed, either by their own mother or by another lactating woman in the group, would die. Choice was not a luxury of the pre modern woman. So back to instincts. Suzanne Colson wrote about biological nurturing and the principle of breastfeeding being a continuation of the baby being in the womb (source: Womb to World, A Metabolic Perspective in Midwifery Today, 2002) and I've long found the idea that a baby is born with all the 'tools' it needs to breastfeed truly fascinating. Mothers have historically misread the signs of a newborn baby. Where thrashing hands and feet are seen, ...