Women have a choice
 

http://news.sky.com/story/1167229/br...-shop-vouchers

B eing a parent a three kids. My wife never breast fed any of them and they have gorwn to be great people.

This is a total waste of money, it should be up to the woman if she wants to breastfeed - who will benefit out of it - no one.

This money could be used for something useful. Even the college of midwifery is against it.

What should happen is that the government should give mothers an incentive of free baby milk from shops which is expensive.

To me a total waste of money.

Re: Women have a choice
 

no, they're not....

they think it shouldn't be the only reason - they do not state they are 'against it'.

Re: Women have a choice
 

The child will benefit. Or had you failed to notice the rapid increase in allergies and bowel disorders in Western countries where we feed on more artificial foods and even stuff them into our kids?

Your own offspring may well have grown up healthy, and that's great, but many more have not. Mammals are raised on milk for a good reason. Their digestive systems are not able to cope, at birth, with anything else. The only substance chemically and biologically compatible with a child's digestive system - and the only thing that will prime the immune system - is milk direct from the same mammalian species. I.e, the child's own mother, or failing that, milk donated by another human.

Formula is exactly what it says on the tin, a formula. It is chemically-altered cows milk. IMO it should be available on prescription only, for those mothers that genuinely cannot breast feed - and there are far fewer of them than you would be led to believe. Mummy's lifestyle choice should not over-ride the child's one and only opportunity to get the healthiest possible start in life.

I bet it would save the NHS a fortune in the long term.

Re: Women have a choice
 

I believe that it is up to the mum to decide on what to do, and NOT to have an incentive to do it.

Re: Women have a choice
 

I believe the reason the NHS is provinding incentives, is because the formula industry pours a vast amount of money into marketing their 'alternative'. Their methods are all the more insidious because they are banned from direct promotion. Take, for example, the endless adverts for 'follow on milk' - these products are utterly pointless. They exist purely in order to allow the industry to get its brand names on TV.

There is a lot of ground to recover from the formula propaganda.

Re: Women have a choice
 

Excellent post.

Re: Women have a choice
 

Also, here is a report on the same story, with a different slant...

Guardian

Re: Women have a choice
 

but she still has the choice no one is forcing her.

For the record I'm not sure incentivising is the right way and the Guardian article does raise a valid point as to how you will now the mother is breast feeding other than watching...

Re: Women have a choice
 

I think most of that is down to the crap western diet

Re: Women have a choice
 

Whilst the benefits of breast feeding are blindingly obvious.

It should be down to the mother, and they should not be attacked by the mammary mafia.

my wife lasted 6 weeks but the babys hunger soon took over, and he went on formula, and thrived on it.

Re: Women have a choice
 

I agree - but the western diet is a bad habit that starts at birth, with formula that sits more heavily on a baby's stomach, conditioning the child from the very outset to think that only gut-bustingly full, is truly full.

Re: Women have a choice
 

I can see your point :)

Re: Women have a choice
 

While, in general, I agree with Chris's comments regarding artificial or processed food, I feel it's a little simplistic to say that formula is automatically bad. It's not always practical for a mother to breastfeed.

Take my sister. Her baby will not take breast milk. She used to spend upwards of 2 hours trying to feed her baby, and he just resisted. It got to the point where she was spending her entire day trying to feed the baby and he was not having much of it, which was extremely stressful for both of them.

The hospital, for their part, were pretty much forcing her to breastfeed, and while they accepted that he needed formula they were not happy about it.

So, as soon as she could, she switched him to formula, and is now weaning him on to solid foods, although he does not like the processed stuff like the heinz baby food, so she is happily researching and preparing all sorts of fresh meals for him.

Re: Women have a choice
 

It is of course impossibly difficult to sit in front of a computer and assess how hard someone else found breast feeding, or whether someone else's baby was failing to thrive until being fed formula.

All I can do is point to the general statistics, which is that the number of babies that cannot breast feed, due to some medical problem with either the baby or the mother, is very low.

Primary lactation failure (mother can't produce enough milk and there is no cure) occurs in just 4% of cases. Secondary lactation failure accounts for a further 11%, but in those cases it can often be corrected, as it will have been caused by poor diet, or poor technique on the part of mother or baby.

Yet (in the US at least, and I think UK stats are similar), fewer than 14% of mothers are still breast feeding at 6 months. If the number of mothers physically able to breast feed for six months was anywhere near that low, the human race would have been extinct millennia ago.